LAAC: Ghost workers’ salary payments schemes, a hardcore problem in district councils

THE continued illegal disbursement of the salary payments on ghost workers has been discovered to be among the hard core problem which for many years has remained unsolved, thus has been deteriorating the development in most district councils in the country. The Parliament has been informed. This is among the hardcore issues contained in an annual report of the Parliamentary Local Authority Accounts Committee (LAAC) which was presented yesterday in Parliament. The report was tabled by its Chairman Rajab .M. Mbarouk an MP for Ole (CUF) and highlighted the mostly troubled areas which are notorious for  the misappropriation of public fund for local government authorities as indicated in financial audit report of the Controller Accounts General (CAG) ending June 30^th 2012. In his 33 paged report booklet, the chairman noted that with the continued habit whose solution has never been found among the executives, moreover the progressive statistics does not indicate signs of eradicating the phenomenon which is growing at an alarming rate. In a bid to effectively stop and control such theft, the Chairman has suggested in his report that since employers have a database of their employees, therefore they have to arrange a comprehensive list of their workers’ payments through a system of Lawson in order to eradicate the habit. Otherwise, he noted that workers who authorizes such payment rolls which contains names of ghost workers purporting to be retired civil servants in their system of payment rolls, should be taken to task and if possible legal measures should be imposed against them. The report further says that, there is a tendency of the Minister of Local Government and Regional Administration of transferring some executives in local government authorities once they realized to have involved in various malpractices including corruption upon discovering such civil servants are quickly moved to other working places. Either in the report it is stated that some executives are promoted into higher ranking position something which has caused suspicion among committee members, despite of the fact that officials from the ministry have been defending the issue that is not happening once brought before the committee to testify.  This is a proof that has brought the attention of the committee members to believe that the ministry responsible is staggering and not committed enough, the Chairman noted in his report and added that, the poor performance of the ministry is seen in some district councils which he mentioned as Mewanza, Mvomero, Kishapu, Kilindi, Bagamoyo, Same and Masasi. He further noted that, the government has been embracing the system to defend grand corruption workers who continues to practice mischief which wreck havoc the intended development of some district councils in the country. In his appeal, the Chairman has called upon the government to desist from doing such things and instead should take them to task in order to maintain the status of the local government authorities whose economic development plans covers approximately 80 percent of the country’s population. Another weakness area, the committee has discovered within the said period is failure of most district council to supervise their own economic development projects. The Chairman has noted in his report that, his committee has discovered that most council’s engineers have been shunning away from supervising various projects initiated by the council, a situation which has caused many projects to deteriorate and below standards and sometimes there are no projects at all. The committee has proposed that, all technical experts responsible to supervise various councils’ economic development projects to stay closer to where these projects have been established in order to carry out their supervision work, instead of staying in the office without moving around. Another crucial area which the committee has discovered to be part of the weakness being shown by most district councils in the country is the slow pace of revenue collections, which the committee says that is due to poor performance shown by agents who have entered into contract job with the council. The report has noted that, lack of professionalism is a result of poor performance and in view of this, kit has suggested that education is needed in order to build the capacity building of the responsible clerks who does the job.