The Sunday Mail
Government is deploying inspectors across the country to monitor civil servants, a Cabinet minister has said.
Regular audits will also be conducted to prevent ineligible individuals from drawing Government salaries and benefits.
The move also seeks to ensure that people do not abscond from duty.
This will see the Salary Services Bureau being linked to the Registrar General’s Office to trigger alarm whenever fraudsters try to access benefits of deceased persons’ families.
The SSB will discontinue pension and other payouts as soon as a death certificate is collected from the RG’s Office.
Disciplinary action will be meted out to culprits in accordance with standing regulations as recommended by the 2014-15 Civil Service Audit Report.
Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare Minister Prisca Mupfumira told delegates at Zanu-PF’s 15th National Annual People’s Conference that implementation of the audit’s recommendations has begun.
“In response to a Cabinet directive, a lot of attention has been put towards management of the Government wage bill. Early this year, we carried out a Civil Service Audit to try and ascertain who Government is employing, whether these people are indeed at their stations.
“Are they carrying out their duties and should they be in that post in the first place? We discovered a lot of anomalies that include cases of people who were being paid for doing nothing, people who were absent from their posts without reason.”
She continued: “We encourage all civil servants to be at their posts at all times, and to do their jobs as they should at all times. To ensure this happens, we have decentralised the Civil Service Commission to all provinces and districts.
“Through these offices, we will be carrying out regular inspections of the Civil Service. We now have inspectors on the ground who will be going around all Government offices and institutions to ascertain whether people are at their posts. This is because we have discovered that without these inspections, we will have many cases of people failing to report for duty.”
Minister Mupfumira said Government was also restructuring its departments.
“It is critical to undertake regular stock-taking to ensure that persons drawing Government benefits such as pensions, salaries and other welfare benefits are indeed entitled to do so.
“We also discovered that there are cases where some characters continued to receive benefits and salaries of deceased former Government workers. In some cases, the Salary Services Bureau continued to deposit salaries of deceased people into banks and the banks were holding on to that money.
“We now have a proposal to link the SSB and the Registrar General’s Office so that when a pension beneficiary dies, the benefits will be cut off once a death certificate has been registered.”
Government wants to streamline its labour costs as State salaries are gobbling 83 percent of revenue, inhibiting capacity to steer socio-economic development.
In the first half of 2015, Treasury spent US$1,54 billion on labour against revenue of US$1,718 billion.
Monthly, US$120 million is spent on salaries, with the least-paid taking home about US$380.
Auditors project savings of nearly US$400 million if all recommendations are implemented.
