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Wed, Nov 18, 2020 – 5:00 PM
Around 3,000 former officers and currently serving in the Singapore civil service were found to have been incorrectly compensated totaling around S $ 10 million.
These people constitute 2% of public servants in service during the last two decades.
The civil service will make up for the S $ 10 million shortfall in benefits for current and former officers, the Public Service Division (PSD) said in a press release on Wednesday.
Some people received under or overcompensation as a result of errors in human resources (HR) records, which have since been corrected.
However, the public administration will not recover the overpayments made to the overcompensated people, “since these were due to mistakes made long ago.”
PSD said it discovered the errors while updating the civil service human resources and payroll IT systems. Internal audits and verifications also revealed miscalculations in some compensation and benefits components.
The errors arose mainly due to human errors in data entry and coding of the systems. The systems also did not have the adequate capacity to detect errors.
Most of the errors involved inaccuracies in the Full Time National Service (FTNS) duration records of male officials.
The civil service recognizes the “reduced fitness” period for which a full-time national service member is eligible as part of the recognized NS period for purposes of determining starting salary and service benefits.
This “fitness cutoff” period was erroneously omitted from some men’s human resource records, which in turn affected their leave and other benefits, PSD said.
Approximately 1,400 people were underpaid as a result of FTNS inaccuracies. Most of these men had a one to two month deficit in the duration of their recorded FTNS. The affected areas included their retirement benefits, increased eligibility for leave, extended service awards, extended sick leave fees, and starting salaries.
The other errors concerned inaccuracies in the IT algorithms used to calculate medical leave wages for people on injury duty leave.
About a thousand public officials were negatively affected by this. Their medical leave wages were wrongly calculated based on gross monthly salary, because the systems did not incorporate the correct formula based on average monthly earnings.
There were also errors in the program that computes the payments that some pensioners make when they retire from public service, so that they receive annual allowances. About 500 people, less than 2 percent of the total government retiree population, were negatively affected by this.
The civil service will contact all those who received insufficient compensation due to errors.
Service employees will be notified by their respective HR departments between November 2020 and March 2021. The process of validation and correction of deficiencies will take place from now until mid-2021.
Those who have left the service will receive certified mail at their last known address, as well as phone calls and home visits, from now until March 2021.
“We would like to assure both serving and former civil servants that there is no need to rush to contact us,” PSD said. Those who were not contacted by March 2021 were not adversely affected by the errors.
People with inquiries can approach the human resources departments of the government agencies they work for or were employed with before leaving the service. You can also email your questions to [email protected].
PSD said it tracked down and validated the source of the specific errors in IT systems once they were discovered.
The division also worked with civil service agencies to verify some 102,000 current and past records, dating back to the 1990s. It also conducted additional checks and recalculated benefits.
The entire lengthy process took more than two years, PSD noted Wednesday. “We will update all records to ensure future accuracy.”
Loh Khum Yean, Permanent Secretary of PSD, said: “The public service deeply regrets the errors and inconvenience caused. We will do our best to reach out to all negatively affected people to apologize for the error and explain the situation. How to fix the discrepancy. “.
PSD has rectified the system’s programming and built-in error detection capabilities to pinpoint potential errors and ensure such inaccuracies do not reoccur, Loh added.
Although statutory councils have autonomy over their own human resource policies, PSD is working with them to verify their human resource records as well. This process is still ongoing, and the statutory boards will also correct any errors if discovered.
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