In the seventh month immediately after Lu Dafang 呂大防 had become the sole counselor-in-chief in the fourth year of the Yuanyou era(1089), the remonstrance official 諫官 Fan Zuyu 范祖禹 expressed his fear of Lu Dafang's autocratic rule, and the related incident concerning the Office of Functionaries 吏額房 also arose during the 8th and 9th month of the same year. The details of this incident are found in the diary of Liu Zhi 劉摯 who was vice director of the Secretariat 中書侍郎 at the time. The Old-Law-Faction government was confronted with a severe financial crisis in the Yuanyou period, and due to this fact, cutting back in every field became an urgent issue. Reducing the number of functionaries 吏額, who were salaried sub-official functionaries, xuli 胥吏, attached to the central government was one of those measures. The establishment of the Office of Functionaries, which was composed of four xuli had been carried out by Dafang and it was directly under his control. It can be surmised that Dafang immediately presented his own proposals to the emperor and received a judgment when final plan to cut the number of staff in the Office of Functionaries was drafted. Although this was a critical issue regarding the central government, it is difficult to obtain information about the Office of Functionaries. This study first documents the establishment of the office in an effort to make a closer examination than Li Tao 李燾 had been able to. As a result of this study, the time of the establishment of the Office of Functionaries was almost certainly in the sixth month of the fourth year as the dismissal of deputy counselor-in-chief 次席宰相 Fan Chunren 范純仁 left Dafang as the sole counselor-in-chief and created the circumstances in which his "despotism" became possible. In relation to this, I examined the incident that Li Tao called the "mistaken issuance of the report in yellow to the secretariat" 録黄誤下中書 which appears in the diary of Liu Zhi 劉摯 Prior to the incident, in regard to the proposal on the functionaries, and prior to the presentation his proposals and after the judgment, it is clear that both vice directors of the Secretariat and Chancellery 中書・門下兩省 had deliberately been eliminated from the decision making process. After the incident, the two simply provided what was no more than a formalistic consent (簽書 qianshu). In other cases also, the vice directors of the Three Departments 三省執政官 agreed to them without ever meeting, and Dafang's simply issuing proposals became the standard practice in reality. Although Fan Zuyu never learned of the existence of the Office of Functionaries, he still feared Dafang's autocratic rule. The basis for his trepidation was twofold: the strikingly negative character of the form of the agreement between Dafang and the officials and the unavoidable result of collusion with the sub-official functionaries, xuli. It was probably recognized that if the counselor-in-chief were able simply to employ the xuli as he pleased, a "despotism" beholding to no one (particulary when the post of deputy counselor-in-chief was vacant) could easily be imposed. The Three-Department system of the Yuanyou era that granted great authority to the counselor-in-chief probably led Fuyu to recognition of this fact. In the ninth month of the same year, Fuyu advocated a return to the system of secretariat and chancellery that had preceded the Three Department system of Yuanfeng.