Vigilance Dept summons records of ‘ghost’ staff

Rajinder Nagarkoti

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, May 17

The UT Vigilance Department has summoned the record of 256 ‘ghost’ staff from the city Municipal Corporation.

After the UT Adviser, Vijay Kumar Dev, marked a Vigilance probe into the detection of the ghost’ employees on MC rolls. The Vigilance Department has written a letter to the civic body to provide details of the ‘ghost’ employees.

A senior official of the MC said they had forwarded the letter to different wings of the MC so that they could compile a report of their respective wing and submit the same to the UT Vigilance Department.

The issue was detected by the Local Audit Department of the MC during the checking of MC records.

When the Chandigarh MC came into existence in 1996, the UT Administration had transferred 1,369 employees of which 1,113 joined the civic body. Yet, the MC continued to pay salaries to the remaining 256 non-existent employees.

The employees had been assigned to work on muster rolls in various engineering departments of the Administration and were paid daily wages. The audit check found that these employees who were transferred from the UT Administration to the MC  in 1996 were in fact non-existent employees who were  paid salaries  by the MC.