Almost €1 million was paid in allowances to staff at a single division of Minister Clint Camilleri’s ministry in a single year. Staff at the Strategy and Support Divison of the Gozo ministry received €956,120 euro in allowances in 2021. When the National Audit Office attempted to investigate how hundreds of thousands of euro were being siphoned into one division, the Gozo ministry refused to provide a list of allowances or amounts paid out. The NAO sent numerous reminders. Clint Camilleri’s ministry completely ignored them.
€815,000 was initially budgeted for allowances for staff at the Strategy and Support Division of the Gozo ministry. That’s on top of their regular salaries. But even that wasn’t enough. The ministry requested another €141,120 bringing the total spend in allowances in that single division to almost €1 million.
That wasn’t all. Another €61,000 was budgeted for overtime for the same Gozo ministry division. Even that didn’t satisfy Minister Clint Camilleri. An additional €113,668 was requested. By the end of the year the total sum paid in overtime to the same division tripled to €174,668.
The NAO attempted to figure out why tens of thousands of taxpayers’ euros were being spent in overtime in one Gozo Ministry division. It was an uphill struggle. Clint Camilleri’s officials failed to provide all the attendance records. The ones provided were either incomplete or illegible, leading the NAO to conclude that the attendance sheets were entirely unreliable.
NAO officers tried their best to make sense of those incomplete disorganised documents. What they found left them frustrated and incredulous.
Employees at the Gozo Ministry were paid overtime when attendance sheets showed no additional work had been done. In the case of some officials who had done some extra work there were significant discrepancies between hours worked and overtime hours claimed and paid for.
Two Ministry officials regularly worked just two hours on public holidays and weekends but were paid for a full day’s work. The vague reason given for their overtime was “pressure of work”.
Most attendance sheets submitted for scrutiny had not been checked and no reviewing officer signed them. In the case of one particular Ministry official he certified his own attendance sheets and overtime claims. Clocking details were illegible in some of the attendance sheets making it impossible for the NAO to establish how many hours the officials had actually worked. When the Ministry was challenged about why illegible records had been approved, their excuse was that “the supervisor in charge is more familiar with the officers’ handwriting and that is why the supervisor verified the (illegible) attendance sheets”.
All requests for overtime were undated. The NAO couldn’t be sure whether those requests had been filled in retrospectively. But the auditors’ suspicions were sufficient for the NAO to recommend that “action is to be taken against those officers who try to abuse”.
One particular officer was paid €6,084 for 395 hours of overtime in just three months - mid-July to October 2021. That officer managed to work a full 9 weeks of overtime in just 12 weeks. To add insult to injury no reason was given for the obscene number of that officer’s overtime hours. A labourer at the Gozo ministry worked 322 hours of overtime, that’s a full eight weeks of overtime, in just five and a half months.
An assistant foreman was paid €2,000 in overtime but his attendance sheets showed he hadn’t worked those hours. Instead of promising to investigate the matter, the Gozo ministry sprang to his defence. Ministry officials claimed that although there was no record of the extra hours worked, they had confirmed he worked those hours by conducting “on site spotchecks”. But they provided no proof to the NAO that such checks had actually been carried out.
And for a touch of the bizarre, a photographer with the Gozo Ministry performed his overtime as “Head Beach Supervisor”. What was the Gozo ministry photographer photographing on the beach? An assistant foreman working at Gozo’s public cleansing section carried out his overtime at the Civil Abattoir and also as “beach inspector”. Another technical officer with the same section also carried out his overtime as “beach inspector”.
No wonder they were so determined to conceal documents from the NAO. The NAO auditors were tearing their hair out - and that’s after having seen a fraction of the documents requested.
The normally restrained NAO’s conclusions were blunt. “Overtime at the Gozo ministry was carried out habitually, very often with vague justifications given. Attendance sheets supporting overtime claims were unreliable”. There was “lack of control over overtime”.
The NAO was constrained to state the obvious. “All documentation is expected to be provided” was one of those recommendations. “Overtime should be resorted to only in exceptional circumstances and as far as possible linked to specific targets” was another.
In one of the most hard hitting comments, the NAO report states: “The Ministry is expected to analyse whether the continuous overtime work is attributable to underperformance during normal working hours… and act accordingly”. The NAO stridently accused Gozo ministry officials of doing practically nothing during normal working hours in order to claim hundreds of thousands in allowances and overtime. And why is any overtime required at all when the Strategy division within the Gozo Ministry has a staggering 797 employees? That’s 20% of the total number of Gozitans working in Malta.
The Gozo Ministry’s sheer contempt for the NAO was manifest not only in the ministry’s failure to provide basic documentation but in its response to the recommendations. It simply ignored them. So incensed was the Auditor General that his report highlighted the Gozo Ministry’s arrogance - “The management did not indicate whether the recommendations will be taken on board”. We all know they won’t. Those are our million euro that Clint Camilleri is arrogantly concealing. And we know exactly where our money’s going - to secure his parliamentary seat.