Degree verification: Bureaucratic red-tape, laxity delays process

Of the total 1,754 employees, only 60 officers have so far submitted their degrees.

ISLAMABAD:

Bureaucratic red-tape and administrative laxity are hindering the verification of educational credentials of civic agency’s employees.

“Capital Development Authority (CDA) continues to flout the directions of the Cabinet Division by not carrying out the verification of certificates and degrees of its employees,” said an official requesting anonymity.

A number of CDA officers, with fake degrees, are neither adhering to the Cabinet Division’s direction nor CDA Board decision in this regard, he added.

The CDA board on October 23rd last year had directed that degree verification of employees be done within a month. “Despite circulating the decision among all the directorates of the authority for compliance, only 60 officers submitted their degrees,” said the officer.

According to a rough estimate by the Finance Wing of the authority, the whole exercise would consume Rs7.2 million.

Earlier, the finance wing, in the first phase, had released Rs0.6 million for the verification of degrees of some 1,600 officers of BS-16 and above, but the amount was transferred back to the kitty as it was not used within the stipulated time.



“In CDA, it is most necessary to verify credentials because some 1,754 employees were recruited in the authority in basic pay scales from 1 to 17 during the past four years without examining their original educational documents,” an official of the Human Resource Development Directorate said.

All these 1,754 people were inducted first on daily-wage basis and later all of them were regularized, relying on the photocopies of their degrees and certificates.

It has become a common practice in the authority that the directorate concerned even does not bother to verify the credentials while placing people against permanent posts, the official added.

The CDA chairman office received scores of anonymous applications with evidences challenging the degrees of even higher officials of the authority, an officer privy to the development told The Express Tribune. He added that there is no system in place to check such illegalities that is why such applications are usually trashed in dustbin.

On the other hand, several deputationists are also working in the authority and many of them got absorbed in CDA.

The authority never verified their degrees and other documents, he said citing a recent example when an officer, whose parent department is PTCL, not only managed to get position of Accounts Officer in BS-18 on deputation but also later absorbed in CDA Service on fake documents and degrees.

He was served a show-cause notice but he got a stay order from a court. Although the authority suspended the officer, it hasn’t taken
any action against those CDA officials who are responsible for checking such illegalities.

Chairman Tahir Shahbaz told The Express Tribune that the board had decided that the verification process would be completed within a month, but it never happened. Justifying the delay, he said the issue was not being pursued vigorously as the CDA was faced with plethora of other issues.

However, Shahbaz assured that a fresh circular would be issued within a day or two to all the directorates asking them to positively submit officers’ educational documents for verification.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 1^st, 2013.