Spending Wisely?: KMC administrator to monitor expenditure

KARACHI:

Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC) administrator Muhammad Hussain Syed has stopped all departments of the organisation from spending on projects not related to development.

At a meeting which started on Wednesday night and ended on Thursday morning, he also asked for the fuel and telephone allowances of the officers to be slashed. The meeting came in the wake of widespread agitation among the organisation’s employees, who have not been paid salaries for the months of June and July.

Syed said that the organisation has not yet received the Rs525 million grant from the Sindh government’s finance department. Only Rs326 million have been released as the organisation’s share from OZT (octroi and Zila tax). Because of this, about half of the organisation’s employees were not paid pension or salary. The remaining staff and pensioners will be paid after the grant is received, Syed said. He added that the government had also increased the employees’ salaries by 20 percent, which meant that KMC would need another 125 to 150 million rupees for paying them.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 27^th, 2012.