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Show REPORT OF THE COMMISSIOXER OF INDIAN APFAIRS. 33 The net results of such a change will be, I feel sure, a lower range of quotations than the same bidders would feel justified in offering in the spring, the season at which it has been the custom to call for proposals. I wisht to be sure also of receiving the current season's products instead of mixing these with held-over supplies. I have therefore postponed the opening df bids'for the class of subsistence articles enumerated until the latter part of September. If the experiment proves as successful as I hope, the pursuit of the same course in the future will result in the Government's procuring the goods at lower prices, or at least eliminating all unnecessary gambling features from the business, and in the agencies' and schools' receiving new fresh stores for their larders, a consideration by no means unimportant in housekeeping on the giant scale to which we are accustomed in the Indian Service. SIMPLIFYING AGENCY ACCOUNTS. The Office has tried of late to lessen the amount of clerical drudg-ery connected with making up agency accounts. The demands of official red tape often compel an agent, tho he may have a fairly com-petent clerk, to stay at his desk and spend on his papers a great deal of time and thought which ought to be devoted to moving about among the Indians and attending personally to their affairs. I am therefore aiming both to reduce the number of papers called for and to make the required forms more convenient, so that the work will be less laborious and more expeditious. For instance, twenty, blank forms have been rearranged so that they can be filled out on the typewriter instead of by pen, and others will be similarly revised as soon as the supply of the old forms now on hand is exhausted. The long property list has lost some of its terrors thru having the articles of usual occurrence printed on the blanks in alphabetical order. By requiring quarterly instead of weekly reports of issues to boarding schools, twelve separate vouchers have been cut out of each quarterly account. A "monthly irregular report of employees " has been done away witb, and the information which it contained is more readily given and found on a new form of pay mll. Other changes in the same direction are contemplated. Notwithstanding the cumbersomeness of the accounts, with few exceptions they have been rendered promptly by the 175 disbursing officers who report to this Bureau, only 26 of whom failed to trans-mit their accounts within twenty days after the expiration of the quarter, necessitating an explanation to the Treasury Department of the delay before additional funds could be placed to their credit. In this Office 731 cash accounts were examined and submitted to 1 S 3 ~ 4 611-3 |