Certificate verification: PM orders scrutiny of govt employees

Government decides to verify the educational certificates of thousands of federal government employees.

ISLAMABAD: The government has decided to verify the educational certificates of thousands of federal government employees – a move likely to put the powerful bureaucracy ill at ease.

Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani directed the establishment division to ask heads of all public sector institutions to verify the educational degrees of employees in their respective departments.

The move can be traced to when the authorities had decided to verify the degrees of lawmakers. At the time, a demand had come mainly from politicians to also check the educational credentials of government employees, as well as judicial and military officers.

A brief official statement issued by the press information department does not clarify, however, if the government intends to verify the educational certificates of all employees, or only officials working on gazetted posts.

Establishment division Secretary Rauf Chaudhry said he has not yet received the orders from the prime minister. Nonetheless he confirmed that the premier had spoken to him over the phone. Chaudhry refused to give details, saying that he would be able to speak on the issue once he gets the order, which is likely on Monday.

The government wants the whole process to be completed in less than two months, apparently an ambitious target keeping in view the capacity of the institutions, especially the Higher Education Commission (HEC) that would have a pivotal role in the process. “Prime Minister Gilani has directed the establishment division that educational certificates of employees working in all federal government institutions may be verified for authenticity by the respective heads of the relevant institutions. This exercise must be completed by April 4, 2011.”

The premier had also desired that the Federal Public Service Commission ensure authenticity of the degree/certificates of all the candidates appearing for selection in the government service, the statement said.

According to official statistics, there are around 3.2 million government employees in the country, which include federal and provincial government employees as well as employees of the state-run enterprises.

Among them, 491,860 employees work with different departments running under the federal government. Around 95 per cent of them – 467,703 work in lower pay scale (grade 1-16) while another 24,157 are working on posts from grade 17 to 22.

The breakup of cadre as per official data of 2010 shows that in pay scale 22 there are 118; pay scale 21 there are 440; in pay scale 20 there are 1,113; in grade 19 there are 3,071; grade 18 there are 6,746 and in grade 17 there are 12,669 total employees working under the federal government.

In case the government verifies degrees of all employees, the deadline of April 4 seems to be an ambitious target as the HEC currently has the capacity to verify 600 to 700 certificates per day.  HEC Executive Director Dr Sohail Naqvi told The Express Tribune that if directed, the commission can enhance the strength at its verification desk, but he was not sure it still would be able to complete the task at the given date in case it has to verify credentials of all employees.

Under the standard procedure, he said the HEC needs the original certificates of all candidates from matriculation to higher degrees to verify the degrees. He said the HEC has a system to verify the matriculation and intermediate certificates too if provided the originals copies, however it would have to send the degrees obtained from abroad to the respective universities to check their authenticity, he added.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 6^th, 2011.