SHILLONG: The Megh-alaya Finance Department while working on the Employees and Pensioners Database has stumbled upon appointments made in different departments against posts which were never sanctioned, including the possibility of ghost appointments.
It was learnt on Tuesday that the government would institute an inquiry to find out about such appointment and also whether the appointments were “ghost appointments” once the data was analyzed.
The database was in the process of being completed as the Centre had made it mandatory for all the state governments to have such database of their employees and pensioners so that sanctioning of funds by the Union government could be based on the databases as these would reflect expenditure like payment of salaries and pensions to the employees.
Additional Chief Secretary BK Dev Verma told reporters that the process of database would be completed in the next three months. He added that an inquiry would be conducted after this to find out about excess appointments.
The Centre had directed all states to have the “Employees & Pensioners Database” after the 13th Finance Commission detected inconsistencies in the state governments’ submission of proposals for fund allocation from the previous years.
During the preparation of the database the finance department found that some of the departments had appointed employees whereas there were no sanction posts. This not only meant additional expenditure for the state government but a finance department official said such appointment could also be “ghost appointments.”
After the process of completion of the database for all the 1,068 state government offices and 54,275 employees excluding the contractual employees in three months’ time the government would analyze the database to find out how many of such employees were appointed without sanctioned posts.