NAB appointed 97 officers on merit

New officers urged to double efforts against corruption

ISLAMABAD: The National Accountability Bureau (NAB) has selected a handful of officers on merit out of thousands of applications.

This was stated by NAB Chairman Qamar Zaman Chaudhry, read a statement released by the bureau on Sunday.

Noting that corruption is a curse and must be put down with iron hands, he said that they had received 94,165 applications. However, NAB selected only 97 on merit during 2017.

“It was a gigantic task to select the best out of the best officers but not one safarish or aberration has occurred in the entire process of recruitment of new batch of NAB officers recruited in 2017,” he stated.

He directed all NAB officers to redouble their efforts in eradicating corruption since the eradication of corruption was a national duty and NAB is committed to eradicating corruption by adopting a Zero Tolerance Policy.

The NAB chief went on to highlight that the anti-corruption watchdog was Pakistan’s apex anti-corruption organisation which had chalked out a proactive Anti-Corruption Strategy to eliminate corruption through a holistic approach to awareness, prevention and enforcement and to arrest corrupt and recover looted money from them and deposit it in the national exchequer.

Since its inception, NAB has recovered Rs287 billion from corrupt and deposited in the national exchequer.

He said that due to the credibility of NAB, the figures of complaints, inquiries and investigations had almost double as compared to the same period of 2015 to 2017.

In this regard, he pointed towards the comparative figures for the latest three years which showed the hard work, transparency by NAB.

Chaudhry said that reputable national and international organisations were putting their trust on NAB and had appreciated the performance of the anti-corruption watchdog.

PILDAT in its recent report stated that 42 per cent of people trust NAB over 30 per cent for police and 29 per cent for government officials. The 2016 report 2016 released by Transparency International showed that Pakistan’s rating had improved by over nine points in the Corruption Perception Index (CPI).

The World Economic Forum according to Global Competitiveness Index rated Pakistan from 126 to 122 this year.

Moreover, NAB had devised a comprehensive Quantified Grading System to review and further improve the performance of officers. Under the grading system, NAB’s regional bureaus have been evaluated for the past three years on an annual and mid-term basis and have helped improve the performance of NAB’s regional bureaus.

He added that NAB organised a seminar for the South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) in Islamabad in which SAARC member countries, including India, appreciated the anti-corruption strategy adopted by NAB.

Subsequently, NAB was selected as the first chairman of SAARC countries’ Anti-Corruption Forum.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 28^th, 2017.