Moving away from the paper-based lengthy system of updating employees’ salaries, this year the government has decided to carry out the “Pay Fixation” process through online forms.
The public servants have been told that their salaries will not be updated under the upcoming 8th pay scale unless they input their national identity (NID) card numbers in the online form.
Yesterday, Budget Wing 1 of the Finance Division under the Ministry of Finance issued a circular, signed by Additional Secretary Mohammad Muslim Chowdhury, making the digital pay fixation process official.
The circular says that this new system will be launched immediately after a gazette notification is published for the 8th pay scale, slated to be implemented in a few months’ time.
Until now, every time there has been a new pay scale, public servants had to get their salaries updated by filling up and submitting printed forms to the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General of Bangladesh.
The auditor general’s office scrutinised the forms and verified the information with existing records before approving the updated salaries. Only then the public servants started getting updated pays.
The Dhaka Tribune has learned that pay fixation took more than two years after the ongoing 7th pay scale was put into effect in 2009.
There are many cases of employees being not truthful in entering their salaries and designations. According to sources, many employees have falsely entered higher salaries in the fixation forms and enjoyed the additional amounts for years before getting caught.
There have also been cases where an employee – by bribing officials of the auditor general’s office – kept drawing salaries from more than one government offices, sources said.
An official of the Finance Division told the Dhaka Tribune: “Corruption and time consumption in pay fixation will be reduced under the online system. In the past, we have seen pay fixation take more than two years due to corruption in the auditor general’s office.”
According to the circular, civil servants will fill up an online form with their personal data. The information gathered thus will be entered into a database. The auditor general’s office will use this database to scrutinise and verify the information.
The circular has made it mandatory for the 2.1 million existing government employees to input their NID numbers and dates of birth in the online form which will have to match the corresponding information they gave while joining civil service.
Those government employees who do not have NIDs, have been asked to get their national identities. Those who have faulty information in their NID cards have been asked to get them corrected.
The circular does not specify any deadline for getting these done, but the since the circular mentions that the online pay fixation system will come into effect along with the pay scale, the public servants would probably get until then.
According to the Finance Division, they would soon sign an agreement with the Election Commission so that the commission’s data could be used for pay fixation.
Will this not put a lot of pressure on the system for amending NIDs? The Finance Division official said: “Yes, it would. But we will be benefitted in the long-run if we endure the temporary inconvenience.”
Two days ago, M Sirajul Islam, secretary to the Election Commission, told media that the commission would hand over machine-readable “smart NID cards” to 96.2 million voters by June next year.
The commission has already signed a Tk796.26 crore contract with a French company for making the smart ID cards. The EC said that before making the digital cards, voters will be given the chance to get mistakes in the existing analogue NID cards corrected, if any.
For getting faulty information corrected in an NID card, a voter would have to collect a prescribed form from the thana or upazila election offices, fill it up and apply for correction.
The application form will have to be furnished with necessary documents and a Tk200 fee will have to be attached in the form of a bank pay order. The recommended banks are Sonali Bank, Trust Bank and Dutch-Bangla Bank.
