By Vernon Daley, Staff Reporter
THE ELECTORAL Office of Jamaica (EOJ) has been paying out nearly $2.5 million a year in increases to 12 employees whose salaries were jacked up in December 1998 without the approval of the Ministry of Finance and Planning.
The revelation came at yesterday's sitting of the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament (PAC), at which the Auditor General's report on the EOJ for the 1998/1999 financial year was examined.
However, Director of Elections Danville Walker justified increasing the salaries without the approval of the Ministry, arguing if this had not been done, the election body would have lost highly skilled information technologists whom it had trained.
Against this background, he said, the EOJ went to the Electoral Advisory Committee (EAC), the body that oversees election policies, to make a case to grant an increase to the 12 persons.
"The EAC took a position that we had spent a lot of money training our staff and we were not about to see them leave and therefore the EAC approved the salaries," Mr. Walker told the PAC. The EAC is awaiting the appointment of three independent members before resuming its sittings.
The EOJ boss explained that before the increase, a number of the employees had resigned because they were being paid below market rate and despite an ongoing review by the Finance Ministry of the salaries for information technologists in the public sector, at the time, it was not clear when salaries were likely to be increased.
In April last year, however, the Ministry completed its review and according to Mr. Walker the salaries of six of the 12 workers now fall within the new guidelines set while some of those whose pay exceeded the benchmark were placed on contract.
Committee chairman Audley Shaw questioned whether putting the employees on contract was a method of getting away from the guidelines set by the Ministry.
"I hope so, because I don't know that you can run the organisation without these people. I can't and therefore a way has to be found to retain them," Mr. Walker said.