NEW DELHI: Facing cases of salary bills being generated for ‘ghost employees’ in some zonal railways for years, the railways have decided to carry a massive employee validation exercise of its 13 lakh staff.
A major fraud in the disbursement of salaries and bills related to ghost employees was unearthed in the railways’ Delhi Division of Northern Zone in March this year. It was found that they were disbursed false travelling allowance, overtime allowance and night duty allowance and other arrears for years.
Financial Commissioner (railway) A K Prasad has written to all zonal railways saying there was an urgent need to validate the employee master data.
“The validation is necessary to establish that employees included in the master table are bonafide employee, appointed by competent authorities, following legislated recruitment procedures,” said Prasad.
Railway Board has now directed zonal railways to take a onetime exercise to validate employee master data with employees’ service records.
According to a report, the ghost employees cost the exchequer Rs 1.5 crore during 2016-17.
Railways also carried an exercise to identify 13,000 absentee employees this year.
To avoid any loopholes in the exercise, the officials have been asked to conduct an independent internal check.