Prime Minister’s Task Force on Austerity and Restructuring Government is mulling to introduce ‘Corruption Sniffing Bots’ for government officials to ensure there is no chance of any income other than the known sources.
According to the available sources, Burhan Rasool, a member of the task force, proposed to use the bots to detect any anomalies in the encrypted data of employees. He also presented concept papers on the bots.
The proposal says that the computer program will notify the employee regarding any discrepancy first so that he/she can make a correction before facing any punitive action.
The meeting also decided to render it mandatory for all government employees to declare their assets and make scrutiny committees for pointing out any civil servant that is living beyond means.
The task force agreed on the formation of scrutiny committees by all departments with an objective of reconciling the assets declaration and tax returns of their employees.
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If any anomaly arises, the employees will be given a chance to explain themselves before any action is decided against them.
The meeting asked some task force members to chalk out rules for the scrutiny committees. The corruption sniffing bots mark a way to leverage technology to augment the prevailing framework to prevent corruption.
Systems to Prevent Corruption
According to the sources, one way to use technology to keep a check on the government officials is to create a central repository of individual financial profiles of the officers and their independents.
This can be achieved through the development and integration of several systems. One of this system involves keeping the payroll data of all government employees accurate, comprehensive, and CNIC-based as opposed to the SAP-based “Project to Improve Financial Reporting & Auditing” (Pifra). Under this system, any source of income other than the government salary will be clearly mentioned.
The second system involves keeping CNIC-based data of parents and dependents of the government employees after running it by National Data and Registration Authority (NADRA).
Other systems include keeping the complete service history of all the officials.
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