AG announces head count of civil servants

The office of the Auditor General (AG) will next month conduct a head count of all civil servants in an effort to clean the government payroll. This comes after reports of loss of colossal sums of money due to mismanagement. 
Among those to be counted and validated are employees of ministries, departments and agencies, all local government staff, health centres staff, universities and tertiary institutions, secondary and primary school staff, statutory authorities and government owned corporations employees. 
“The overall objective is to establish the factors affecting the credibility and efficiency of the government of Uganda wage, pension and gratuity management processes and recommend remedial measures,” an April 25 public notice by the Auditor General reads in part. 
“The Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development has clarified that only verified staff will appear on the payroll for the next financial year starting July 2023,” the notice adds. 
All employees will be required to avail documents, key among them, a National ID, work ID, initial appointment letter and posting instructions. 
Others are letters of promotion and change of names where applicable. All staff to be validated will be required to be physically present.
Ms Gloria Namugera, the communications manager in the Office of the Auditor General, said: “You have heard some of the audits that we have undertaken where you find that there are ghosts and so on. So, this is to validate if we have the right ones on the payroll with the right qualifications and rightly placed in those jobs. Then recommendations will be made.”
The head count method announcement comes weeks after this publication on April 11, reported plans for a fresh payroll audit to determine the exact number of civil servants it employs and to find out exactly how much it should be paying in salaries. 
Earlier,  the Monitor had also reported, basing on findings by the Auditor General, losses of taxpayer money amounting to more than Shs80b in the last financial year due to payroll mismanagements.  
Glitches cited include ghost workers, access to the payroll using forged minutes, delayed removal of the dead, payments to ineligible persons, delayed access, overpayments and underpayments. There are also anomalies relating to under-remittance, inaccurate computation of pension and gratuity, and non-deduction and under-deduction of Pay As You Earn (PAYE).
In some cases, officials used the wrong formula to compute statutory deductions and use of wrong salary scales.
These have persisted despite interventions by the Ministry of Public Service forcing the Finance ministry, which is the custodian of the country’s resources, to seek a special audit for a clean-up that would plug the hemorrhage of the already scarce resources. 
For example, in the Financial Year 2022/23, Shs1b was paid to 795 staff, who had either retired, transferred, absconded or died, with the worst delays ranging from one to 16 months. 
The Finance ministry Permanent Secretary and Secretary to the Treasury, Mr Ramathan Ggoobi, while appearing before the parliamentary Committee on Budget in January, said only a scientific audit would fix gaps in the payroll management. 
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