Okaz

THE Control and Investigations Board (CIB) has registered the absence of hundreds of government employees from their offices at the end of the official holidays.

The board examines random samples from the employees when its visits the ministries or government departments during the first day of work after the holidays. Such samples will provide the decision makers with reliable statistics about the number of the employees who do not come to work at the end of the vacation period.

Under the rules and regulations of the Ministry of Civil Service, a day of absence is considered equivalent to two days when it comes to deduction of salary as a punishment. This should be applied by the concerned ministries and government departments without waiting for guidance in this regard from the CIB, the General Auditing Bureau (GAB) or the National Anti-Corruption Commission (Nazaha).

If the days of absence were not deducted from the salary of an employee, this will mean that the employee is being paid for the days he or she has not come to office, which is absolutely illegal. It will also give him or her enough reason to repeat the absence. This will hurt the people›s interest and will simply mean a complete waste of the public funds.

The government has about 1.6 million men and women employees. If about 5 percent of them are absent from their work, their number will reach more than 80,000. If one day›s pay was cut from each employee for the absence from work, the amount will go into millions. Imagine what will the amount be if the employee has been absent for 10 days if we consider his or her average daily salary as SR200.

The absence of the employees from work on the first day of the resumption of work after the public holidays such as the Eid Al-Fitr, Eid Al-Adha, the National Day or the school summer vacation are over should be dealt with sternly. There should not be any slackness in this regard.

The absence from work for no valid reason should not be tolerated at any cost, otherwise chaos will prevail and the offices will become empty.

The bigger role, however, lies with the supervisory bodies such as the CIB, GAB and Nazaha. They should carefully monitor not only the presence of the employees from offices but also the achievement of each individual employee during the work hours, which begin at 7:30 a.m. and end at 2:30 p.m.

If these supervisory bodies find that the performance of the employees is satisfactory and that they are disciplined, this will mean that the citizens and expatriates are being served properly. If this is not the case, the concerned employees should be penalized.

The employees who follow the office discipline are earning halal (permissible) money while the others are being paid salaries that they do not actually deserve.