The Auditor-General has a clipboard, a calculator, and a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world actually stays upright. The recent audit report slamming the Hong Kong Fire Services Department (FSD) for "delayed" prosecutions is a masterclass in bureaucratic bean-counting. It treats public safety like a factory assembly line. It assumes that more court summonses equals fewer fires.
It is wrong.
If you want a city that actually functions, you don't want an FSD that hits every administrative deadline for legal action. You want an FSD that prioritizes compliance over paperwork. The audit’s obsession with the 12-month window for fire hazard abatement notices (FHAN) misses the reality of urban engineering. We are not talking about clearing a blocked exit in a corner shop. We are talking about retrofitting crumbling 1960s industrial blocks with integrated sprinkler systems and modern hydraulic feeds.
Speed is the enemy of quality. In the rush to satisfy an auditor’s spreadsheet, we are trading long-term structural integrity for short-term legal "wins."
The Compliance Paradox
The audit highlights that nearly 20% of prosecutions for failing to comply with fire safety directions took longer than a year to initiate. The "lazy consensus" here is that the FSD is being soft. The public outcry suggests that if we just slapped more fines on building owners faster, the problems would vanish.
Here is the truth: A fine is a transaction. For many property owners in high-density districts like Mong Kok or Sham Shui Po, a $50,000 fine is just the "cost of doing business" compared to a $2 million structural overhaul.
When the FSD extends a deadline, they aren't being lazy. They are often keeping the owner at the negotiating table. Once you prosecute, the relationship turns purely adversarial. The owner pays the fine, feels they have "settled" their debt to society, and the fire hazard remains exactly where it was.
I have seen this play out in commercial real estate for twenty years. The moment a government agency shifts from "compliance partner" to "prosecutor," the engineers walk out and the lawyers walk in. Litigation does not install smoke curtains.
The Myth of the Uniform Deadline
The audit report treats every Fire Hazard Abatement Notice (FHAN) as an equal unit of work. It’s a logical fallacy.
- Category A: The Immediate Threat. A locked fire door. This should be prosecuted in 24 hours. No excuses.
- Category B: The Systemic Failure. A faulty pump system in a 40-story building. This requires parts from overseas, specialized technicians, and building committee approval.
By demanding a uniform speed of prosecution, the Auditor-General is effectively telling the FSD to treat a missing extinguisher the same way they treat a massive structural deficit. When you incentivize speed, the department will naturally gravitate toward "low-hanging fruit." They will prosecute the small shopkeeper with a messy hallway because it's an easy win for their KPIs, while the complex, dangerous industrial retrofits get pushed to the bottom of the pile because they take "too long" to process.
The Resource Trap
The audit notes a "slackening" in follow-up inspections. Let’s talk about the math that the bean-counters ignored.
The number of "composite" buildings (mixed-use residential and commercial) in Hong Kong has ballooned. The complexity of these inspections has scaled exponentially with new building codes. Yet, the headcount for inspectors hasn't kept pace with the architectural density.
When you demand more prosecutions, you are demanding more man-hours spent in courtrooms, preparing evidence bags, and filing legal briefs. Every hour a fire officer spends sitting in a magistrate’s court is an hour they are not on-site inspecting a high-risk godown.
We are cannibalizing our field expertise to feed a legal machine.
A Thought Experiment in Misplaced Priorities
Imagine a scenario where the FSD hits 100% of its prosecution deadlines. The Auditor-General is happy. The spreadsheets are green. But because the FSD was so busy filing paperwork, they missed the fact that three new "subdivided flats" were built in a sensitive industrial zone. The prosecution was successful, the fine was paid, but the building is still a tinderbox.
Did we win? Or did we just satisfy a reporting requirement?
Stop Measuring the Wrong Metrics
If we want to actually "fix" fire safety, we need to stop asking "how fast did we sue them?" and start asking "how many hazards were actually removed?"
The current audit-driven approach encourages a "tick-the-box" culture. It creates a perverse incentive for officers to issue notices for the sake of having a paper trail, rather than doing the hard, grinding work of forcing an owner to actually fix a pump.
The Auditor-General points out that some cases were delayed because of "pending legal advice." In the world of the bureaucrat, this is a failure. In the real world, this is called due process. Filing a flawed prosecution that gets thrown out of court is a much bigger waste of public resources than waiting three months to ensure the case is airtight.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Ownership
The audit conveniently ignores why these prosecutions take so long: The disappearing owner.
Hong Kong's property market is a labyrinth of shell companies, overseas trusts, and "Tontine" style ownership structures in old buildings. Finding a person to actually serve a summons on is often a detective job that would make the HKPF blush.
The Auditor-General suggests the FSD is slow. The reality is that the FSD is playing a game of hide-and-seek with owners who have mastered the art of corporate invisibility. Demanding faster prosecution without reforming the Land Registry or how we hold building management offices (BMOs) accountable is like yelling at a car to go faster when it has no wheels.
The Strategy Shift
We need to stop viewing fire safety through the lens of criminal law and start viewing it through the lens of asset risk.
Instead of more prosecutions, we need:
- Public Risk Ratings: Every building's fire safety status should be pinned to its digital entry in the Land Registry. If you can’t get fire insurance or a mortgage because the FSD has flagged your building, you will fix the hazards faster than any $10,000 fine could ever compel you to.
- Technical Assistance over Legal Threats: For "Three-Nothings" buildings (no BMO, no owners’ corporation, no management), the government should perform the works and charge the cost back to the property tax (Rates) bill with a massive interest penalty.
- Prioritization Matrices: We must give the FSD the explicit authority to ignore minor administrative delays in favor of high-risk structural enforcement.
The audit report is a classic example of "Management by Spreadsheet." It assumes that because something can be measured, it is important. It assumes that a delay is always a sign of incompetence rather than a sign of a complex, ongoing negotiation for actual safety.
If the FSD follows the Auditor-General's recommendations to the letter, we will see a surge in legal activity, a spike in fine revenue, and absolutely no change in the number of people living in fire-prone buildings.
The FSD’s "delays" aren't the problem. They are a symptom of a system that values the appearance of enforcement over the reality of engineering.
Stop asking for more court dates. Start asking for more sprinklers.
