The Office of the Director of Public Officers Declarations (ODPOD) says only the review of the Assets Declaration Law would assist in clearing out ghost workers in the Civil Service.

ODPOD Director Michael Chiusiwa said this in Lilongwe on the sidelines on an interface with the Parliamentary Public Appointments Committee (PAC).

He said: “The colleagues in the public service are failing to cooperate according to what the law stipulates.

One way of not cooperating is by not letting us have access to staff returns, staff returns do help us ascertain who has declared, who hasn’t declared but this is the very big challenge that we have been  facing since the inception of the institution in 2014.”

According to Chiusiwa, the current law does not mandate the Office special powers whenever public officials fail to comply with its guidelines.

“And we can indeed conclude that may be one reason why we don’t have such information is that there are ghost workers and these ghost workers can easily be unearthed if we have the staff returns,” Chiusiwa said.

He added that the current reform agenda that is being spearheaded by the Law Commission would assist in filling such gaps.

“It is one pillar that we have identified as an office to amend some of the provisions in the law that are not helping to achieve the objective of the law, so we are consulting with the special Law Commission as we submitted to them areas of amendment,” Chiusiwa said.

Concurring with the Director, the Committee said there is indeed need to review the current law in order to give the Office special powers.

“Exactly, that’s true and the right way to go because what we feel as a Committee is that ODPOD has limited powers in terms of imposing sanctions.

So we feel that if a public officer or us the politically exposed persons don’t declare then after confirmation by the monitoring committee the Director should have those powers to write the appointing authority,” said Joyce Chitsulo, the Committee’s Chairperson.