Audit Discovers Phantom Government Worker Had Perfect Attendance Record Maintained by Sympathetic HR Officer Who ‘Felt Bad’

The Ghost Employee: Present in Spirit, in Payroll, and Apparently in the Morale Statistics

A Commission on Audit review of a Metro Manila local government unit has uncovered a ghost employee who has been receiving a monthly salary for eight years despite not reporting to work since 2016, when the employee — identified in the audit report as ‘Employee X’ pending legal proceedings — relocated to Cebu for personal reasons and neglected to inform the relevant human resources office, which in turn neglected to remove the employee from the payroll because, as the HR officer explained to auditors, ‘he seemed like a nice person and I did not want to cause problems.’

The audit report notes that Employee X received a total of approximately two million eight hundred thousand pesos over the eight-year period in monthly deposits to a bank account that the employee accessed regularly from Cebu, Davao, and, on one occasion, Osaka, suggesting that the question of whether the employee was aware of receiving a salary for work not performed has an answer that does not require extensive investigation.

The Comparative Productivity Assessment

What has complicated the political narrative around the discovery is an internal assessment conducted by the same LGU that found Employee X, based on the historical record of outputs attributed to his former position, had a productivity rating in his final year of physical attendance that ranked above three current employees in the same department who are physically present and whose performance reviews describe their contributions as ‘satisfactory’ in the specific way that government performance reviews describe performances that are technically above the threshold for termination. ‘This raises questions,’ said one COA auditor who declined to be named, ‘that we were not asked to investigate but probably should.’

The HR Officer’s Statement

The HR officer responsible for maintaining the payroll provided a written statement confirming that she knew Employee X had not reported to work since 2016, that she considered the situation ‘awkward to raise,’ and that she had assumed ‘someone else was handling it.’ The statement does not identify who the someone else was. The COA has referred the matter to the Office of the Ombudsman and noted that ‘the process of determining accountability is expected to take between eighteen and thirty-six months.’

Full COA reports at Commission on Audit Philippines. Comedy: The Daily Mash.

SOURCE: http://prat.UK