Prime
Civil servants to miss salary if not counted
Primary Seven pupils of Nyabikoni Primary School in Kabale Town welcome their teacher back to class after a staff strike last year. The government is carrying out a nationwide verification exercise for all civil servants. PHOTO | ROBERT MUHEREZA
What you need to know:
- The audit, which started two months ago, will be concluded next month and those who will be left out will cease to be government employees.
The Ministry of Finance yesterday said all civil servants will have to physically present themselves for verification by the Auditor General as part of an ongoing payroll audit.
Whoever fails to turn up for the head count will no longer be considered a government worker. And as such, they will not be paid salary, beginning July 2023.
This is the first time in modern day Uganda that the authorities are undertaking such a wide-ranging payroll audit across all ministries, local governments, departments and agencies.
The evidently drastic action is part of a joint effort being undertaken together with the Ministry of Public Service to stamp out the perennial problem of shortfalls in salary and wage budgets.
Until now, Finance has repeatedly found itself approaching Parliament for disruptive supplementary budget approvals to cover the wage bill, which is itself prone to manipulation by corrupt accounting officers.
Addressing journalists at the ministry, Permanent Secretary/Secretary to the Treasury Ramathan Ggoobi said the Auditor General should determine just how many government workers there are, and how much they are earn.
“The problem has been laxity in the management of the payroll and budget indiscipline… The implementation of the outcome of this exercise is going to be 100 percent; there will be no excuse. Those who don’t participate will not be included after the exercise,’’ he said.
“This exercise involves physical verification. Those who will not get verified will be deemed not to be employed by the government of Uganda,” Mr Ggoobi added.
“All employed public servants must present National Identification Numbers and payslips while appearing for verification”.
Auditor General John Muwanga. PHOTO/FILE
Mr Ggoobi anticipated that the audit, which started two months ago, will be concluded next month.
It is hoped that accurate data about permanent and temporary staff will finally be collected. For now, it appears that the government does not have this information.
Mr Ggoobi refused to say whether the finance ministry unaware of how many people government employs, observing that the question was hypothetical when asked.
His ministry, he maintained, asked the auditor general to look into public pay in order to address the persistent problem of supplementary budget requests.
“Accounting officers have been illegally employing people … They use/share the wages that have been released for them to pay [genuine] public servants to pay those people who are illegally employed and [then] they keep complaining of revenue shortfalls and asking for more money through supplementary budgets. We want to stamp out the problem of revenue shortfalls and budget indiscipline,” he said.
He said the outcome will enable efficiency in salaries and wages-budgeting, and result in considerable savings by weeding out ghost employees.
In the budget document for financial year 2023/24 currently before Parliament, the ministry proposes a recurrent budget increase from Shs15.7 trillion to Shs15.73 trillion of the country’s revised revenue and expenditure estimates for the period which stand at Shs50.9 trillion.
An attempt is being made to stop public expenditure from defining the budget, with Mr Ggoobi saying that allocations should depend on what is available in the national treasury resource envelope.
Measures in that direction will be greatly boosted by reductions in supplementary expenditure, he said.
Ramathan Ggoobi, Finance ministry PS
“Our mission is to stamp out non-existent employees. We would want to know the number of workers on the payroll, how much they are earning and who the pensioners are,” he said.
Government this financial year budgeted Shs6.4 trillion for salaries and wages. But this fell short after President Museveni’s unilateral pay increase for ‘scientists’ and some military officers.
This announcement plunged public financial management into chaos. The finance ministry is reported to have scrambled to re-arrange its planning which saw thousands of workers missing salaries for months. There were countrywide protests by the so-called non-scientists. They accused the government of discriminatory behaviour which contradicted principles of equitable pay as provided for in Uganda’s Constitution.
Past pay scams
In April, Monitor reported that an investigation by the Auditor General revealed early this year that taxpayers lost in excess of Shs80 billion to illegal or questionable payments to 28,000 local government workers.
The salary forensic audit for the year ending June 2022, unearthed a catalogue of overpayments and cases of illegal payroll access and deductions.
Also found was delayed removal of the dead from payrolls or cancellation of payments to ineligible persons.
There were multiple anomalies relating to under-remittance, inaccurate computation of pension and gratuity, and non-deduction and under-deduction of Pay As You Earn taxes.
According to the report, in some cases, officials used wrong formulae to compute statutory deductions.
Payment of salary using wrong salary scales led to an overpayment of Shs532 million to 1,264 staff in 26 local governments, while Shs2.3 billion was lost in overpayments. The forensic audit revealed that workers and pensioners were robbed of up to Shs41.1 billion.
It also uncovered gross payroll mismanagement in local governments despite interventions by the Ministry of Public Service. For example, Shs1 billion was paid to 795 staff who had either retired, transferred, absconded or died.
A look-through the local payrolls of 129 local governments found that Shs19 billion was lost to persons who accessed the payroll through forgery of appointment documents.
The AG further found 609 secondary school and tertiary institution employees, under the Education Service Commission (ESC), who used forged minutes to access the government payroll.
The auditors reported an inability by local governments to validate eligibility of the posting instructions because they lacked an automated database at the ESC containing minute extracts for all secondary school teachers.
In 75 local governments, the AG uncovered an overpayment of Shs3.8 billion to 2,085 employees and 270 pensioners.
