THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Finance Department has revised the guidelines for issuing salary and no liability certificates to government employees. The Drawing and Disbursing Officer (DDO) of an office will continue to issue the certificate. In the case of DDOs, their superior officers will issue the certificate.
Either 75 times the basic pay of an employee or Rs 3 crore, whichever is less, should be taken into consideration while issuing the salary certificate.If an employee stands surety for another person, the
salary certificate can be given by considering 50 times the basic pay or `2 crore, whichever is less. Also, the loan amount should be considered as the debt liability of the employee.
DDOs will give salary certificates only for loans which can be repaid during the service tenure of an employee. The DDO should also keep a register to record the issuance of salary and no liability certificates to the employees. DDOs should initiate the recovery process the very next month of receiving a request from the financial institution, including cooperative institutions, from where the loan was taken. It will be stopped only when a stop memo is received from the institution. At present, in case of transfer of an employee, the DDO concerned will send a last pay certificate of the employee to his/her new office. From now on, records of their liabilities will also be sent.
“The new decision comes in the wake of incidents in which government employees fall into insolvency and indebtedness due to erroneous issuance of salary certificate,” said an order issued by Additional Chief Secretary (Finance) Rajesh Kumar Singh.
Earlier, the government could initiate recovery from the pension in case the loanee retires from service. But in the case of employees who joined service after April 1, 2013, the pension is from the National Pension System and not from the consolidated fund of the state government. Hence, the state
cannot initiate recovery from that.