CM Murad Ali Shah knows ‘municipal agencies have ghost employees’

Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah on Tuesday said he was aware of the presence of a large number of ghost employees on the payroll of the municipal agencies of Karachi.

The CM made this unusual admission while chairing a meeting at the Chief Minister House to review the working of municipal and civic agencies of the city. The meeting was attended by Sindh Local Government Minister Syed Nasir Hussain Shah, Sindh Law and Environment Adviser Barrister Murtaza Wahab, Karachi Administrator Iftikhar Ali Shallwani, Karachi Commissioner Sohail Rajput and the deputy commissioners posted in the city.

The chief minister said that from now onwards, the Sindh Accountant General would be responsible for the disbursal of salaries to the staffers of the city’s municipal agencies instead of the finance departments of these civic institutions. He said the move would help detect the cases of ghost staffers.

Shah said that in the next phase, the municipal staffers in other divisions of the province would too get salaries from the Sindh AG. He asked the chiefs of municipal and civic agencies in the city, the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation, the Karachi Development Authority and the Sindh Building Control Authority, to verify the availability of every employee in their respective institution before releasing salaries to them.

The CM also discussed how retired municipal staffers had been regularly drawing salaries owing to the faulty financial system of the city’s civic agencies. Shah said he was also aware of the situation that “low-grade employees of the municipal agencies have been illegally drawing salaries of senior positions in their respective agencies”. He said such irregularities in the service affairs of the municipal agencies of the city had to be detected and corrected.