Committee to review reforms

By HELEN TARAWA
A NUMBER of Government entities will come under scrutiny when the Special Parliamentary Committee on Public Sector Reforms conducts a review into their operations.
Chairman and Northern governor Gary Juffa, who was reappointed in Parliament last week, told The National that the review would determine if these entities were still useful to the State.
“A large number of entities may have outlived their usefulness and are no longer relevant or may not be performing according to expectations and they have become liabilities rather than assets for the country,” he said.
“We need to save money that’s best used for building government and public infrastructure, roads, bridges, hospitals, schools or delivering government service.”
Juffa said the committee would also be looking at the public service payroll blowout where criminal elements had diverted more than K300 million to K500 million from wages and salaries for their own use.
“We want to find out where this is happening and how this is happening and who is involved.
“My committee is looking into the excessive payroll blowout because of ghost names and electoral payroll fraud,” he said.
The chairman clarified that there was no intention to reduce wages and salaries.
Juffa said a report into the Public Service Salaries budget blowout had been completed by an independent accounting firm.
Accounting firm Deloitte has been engaged to carry out the review on payroll integrity and human resource management in the public service.
Juffa said despite these reviews, certain elements in the public service had resisted and because most were comfortable in the status quo, the report would be presented to the Department of Personnel Management (DPM) to enforce the cost saving measures.