Prime
100 Mulago workers scrapped off payroll
Patients wait to be attended to at Mulago Hospital. PHOTO by Stephen Otage
KAMPALA.
About 116 Mulago national referral hospital employees are on the verge of losing their jobs after an audit declared them ghost staffers. The affected, although most of them are still reporting for duty, include; pathologies who are paid about Shs200 per body they work on, Doctors some of whom risk their lives daily working in the Ebola camps, Senior Clinical officers, radiologists, and dentists.
The list also include the hospital Internal auditor, employees in the Public Relation department and support staff such as cooks, drivers and record keepers.
It is further understood that the affected employees have since missed their last month salary, although the national referral hospital official in charge of personnel and human resource denies the claim.
The Auditor General forensic audit conducted by PWC (PriceWaterhouse), between November 2011 and May this year, revealed what it described as cases of invalid records on Mulago payroll — implying that the national referral hospital is paying money to not only non-existent workers but also for services that were not being rendered.
According to a correspondent dated June 19, 2012 from the Public Service Commission Permanent Secretary, Mr Jimmy Lwamafa, to Mulago referral hospital Executive Director (ED) Byarugaba Baterana, who didn’t pick our repeated calls over the matter, had a list of at least 116 names.
The letter demanded that the ED explains the payroll anomalies by end of July.
Sunday Monitor could not establish whether Dr Byarugaba submitted his side of the story, given that by press time he still could not respond to phone calls.
But his Assistant Commissioner in charge of Human Resources and personnel issues, Mr John Baptist Ssemakula, believes the manner in which the audit was conducted was not only irregular but ridiculous, imploring Public Service to conduct another round of audit.
He said: “The PWC people that did the audit didn’t consider the fact that Mulago referral hospital operates a 24-hour shift. They would do count between 8am-5pm yet we have employees who change shift beginning at 6pm.”
He added: “Our payroll is clean but the most important thing is that these kinds of things simply discourage hard working staffers who are already giving their all irrespective of the working conditions.”
Although, the same kind of audit was conducted in all government institutions in June, what seems odd is that some of the Mulago hospital staffers who have been scrapped off the payroll are genuine employees and not ghosts as PWC audit claims.
