Stop paying unjustifiably absent employees – Teixeira to Permanent Secretaries

Minister of Governance and Parliamentary Affairs, Gail Teixeira on Friday said that the accounting officers from the various Ministries should stop paying employees within the public sector who fail to show up to work.

This was after it was revealed during the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC) meeting on Friday, where the Ministry of Health’s accounts in the Auditor General 2016 report was being examined, that some $1.7 million was overpaid as net salaries to 16 employees – a recurring issue across the various Government Ministries and agencies.
Former Permanent Secretary, Trevor Thomas told the PAC that the Ministry continues to grapple with the issue of overpayments. He offered that one of the scenarios that would lead to this situation is when employees walk off the job or resign at the end of the month but salaries would have already been paid. Public servants’ salaries are paid by the third week of every month.
According to the former PS, the Ministry has made attempts to recover some of these salaries and has even sought legal advice on addressing the issue.
“It’s an ongoing problem that we’re dealing with… The Ministry has put systems in place to reduce it as such as possible so, for example, if a person proceeds on leave, their salaries are there until they resume duties and so on. But the main challenge is that the structure is that persons are paid before the end of the month and sometimes the person just leave like that [afterwards]… and while we make attempts to recover the funds, because salaries are paid through the bank, it is not always that successful. So it’s an ongoing effort to continue to recoup monies from persons,” Thomas explained.
In fact, it was explained that the salaries that go through the banks, some of the financial institutions are sceptical of withdrawing from the accounts since they can only do so with permission from the account holders.
On this note, Opposition Member of Parliament Ganesh Mahipaul asked about systems in place to reduce the continuous overpayments.
Current Permanent Secretary at the Health Ministry, Malcom Watkins disclosed that they are currently working to speed up the bureaucratic process. This, he noted, begins with getting the backlog cleared up so that when an employee leaves, the records can be updated in order to reduce the “haemorrhaging” of the public accounts.
However, Principal Personnel Officer, Chetram Phoenix informed the Committee that this issue is further compounded by logistic challenges that the Health Ministry faces including the fact that there are staff across all 10 administrative regions. He noted that this adds to the overpayments since by the time the Ministry is informed of persons leaving the job in some of these regions then salaries for one, sometimes two months would have already been paid.
Nevertheless, PS Watkins indicated that they are currently working to improve these deficiencies in the current system, which he described as “broken”. He noted that this will take time.
But this did not go down well with Minister Teixeira, who contended that there must be more alertness and better communication linkages between the Regional Health Officers (RHOs) and Heads of Departments in the Ministry to work together to avoid this issue of overpayments.
“There has to be a more careful examination of the payroll… [So] that the RHOs out there who are in charge of the regions and the Ministry’s Heads of Department. [When] someone walks off the job – they haven’t found them for three-four days and they haven’t submitted medicals and they may not have officially resigned but they’re not just there, there is supposed to be a system in the Personnel Department for those Heads to [be alerted that] that’s reason to stop the payroll in the first place,” the Minister posited.
She went on to say that “Whilst we are pleased to hear that there will be some improvements, we have to be structured and systemic… I keep hearing every Ministry say people walk off and we can’t do anything about it… [But] there is the means and ways that the PS can say to the Finance people that the following people are not here and therefore, the cheque in the first place would not be electronically distributed.”
According to Minister Teixeira, while this is not a fool proof system, it will reduce the prevalence of overpayments to employees who are unjustifiably absent from work.