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Govt to save K0.5 billion
By
Denis Mzembe - 28-11-2002 |
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The auditor general has said government will be able to save up to about K500 million annually if payrolls for various ministries are cleaned up to exclude names of deceased people, those who have resigned and ghost workers.
Auditor general Henry Kalongonda said on Wednesday government has had a bloated wage bill because of various anomalies in the salary preparation process.
“The current structuring of the civil service is such that input documents are not authorised by senior officers. Salary change sheets are done at low level and people can enter any thing including wrong information. Officers who get loans can even delete their names from the system,” he said.
Kalongonda said responsible officers in some cases have not been reconciling inputs against outputs and, in other instances, one person is responsible for writing cheques and input data which is wrong as the roles are supposed to be performed by different individuals.
“People in the salaries department are very junior and are tempted to do anything. We should give officers responsibilities commensurate with their grading.
“A lack of coordination between human resources and salaries departments has also been a problem because human resources has sometimes not relayed information to salaries when an officer dies or resigns so that the name can be removed from the roll,” he said.
Kalongonda said the monitoring process has also not been giving officers an idea of why the wage bill has been fluctuating.
Government, however, has since set up a task force to check on how the situation can be improved, he said.
The auditor general said the task force is composed of officers trained in different disciplines from the Ministry of Education, National Audit Office, Accountant General’s office and the Treasury.
Heads of the department from which members of the task force have been drawn have also formed their own committee to oversee the whole process of revamping systems for handling the wage bill in the civil service.
Kalongonda intimated that with the introduction of the Malswitch system by the Reserve Bank of Malawi, government may be compelled to pay the bulk of its employees, especially in urban areas, through the bank system to curb “dead people and ghost employees” from receiving salaries.
He said it is expected that the process of cleaning up the budget of undesirables may take up to six months from now “although it will be an ongoing process”.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently expressed concern that government’s wage bill has contributed to overexpenditure because, among other things, most people on the payroll do not deserve to be there.
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