CM limits officers’ electricity allowance

LAHORE: The Chief Minister’s Secretariat has set a limit for the amount of money that officers posted at the secretariat can claim from the public kitty for their utility bills, The Express Tribune has learnt.

Officers posted to the Secretariat were previously entitled to full reimbursement on their electricity, gas, water and telephone bills.

But the secretary to the chief minister received repeated complaints that officers were claiming increasingly unreasonable amounts on their electricity bills, and were hurting the austerity drive launched by the government.

Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif has now fixed the limit for reimbursement on residential electricity bills to a maximum of the current basic pay scale (BPS) of an officer, or the sum of the actual bill, whichever comes to less.

So a BPS-17 officer, for example, would not be entitled to claim more than his basic pay of around Rs 14,000.

There are 932 employees posted in the Chief Minister’s Secretariat, including 115 officers of grade 16 and above who were entitled to full reimbursement.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 6^th, 2010.