Frozen allowances exercise almost thawed; thousands saved

Charles Gibson

The Ministry of Public Service announced in July that a thorough review of public service allowances would be carried out. That process has been ongoing and its purpose is to trim the fat off the one point five million dollars that the ministry pays in allowances each month. All ministries and departments were required to submit lists of public officers, their allowances and the reasons for payment. To speed up that process, Minister of Public Service, Senator Charles Gibson proposed a freeze of allowances that were to be paid in September. The move wasn’t well received by some public officers, but it has worked out well and the review is almost complete.  Gibson and C.E.O. Marian McNab provided an update today.

Senator Charles Gibson, Minister of Public Service

“We know that in many cases when you write and you ask for these things it never comes. So what I had proposed was that we do a temporary freeze on allowances for the month of September and so what is now happening is that we have been receiving from ministries and departments a list, all these lists of people who are receiving allowances. And so we have been verifying those allowances and I’m very proud to say Miss McNab who is the and her team have been working very hard along with the P.S.U. to ensure now that those allowances, those lists that we have received, we have gone through them, they are now verified and we are now committed to have them ready to be issued at the end of this month right C.E.O.? And those persons who did not get the allowance for the month of September, they will get now for September and October, so nobody is going to be denied of any allowance unless, of course, it’s an illegitimate allowance.  Of the one point five that we are now paying, from what I am seeing now that are legitimate would be about one point two, one point three thereabout but I cannot tell you the exact figure because it’s still work in progress. The other thing we’re finding of course is that some of the allowances are not uniform, meaning that some people may be getting the very same allowance, while some may be getting a hundred dollars, some may be getting one-twenty-five while it should be one-fifty or whatever the case may be so all those things we are trying to bring uniformity to what we’re doing, to bring standardization to what we’re doing and to verify that the allowances are indeed legitimate.”

Marian McNab

Marian McNab, C.E.O., Ministry of Public Service

“The reason why the allowances are that high per month is because you have allowances being paid to let’s say members of the Belize Defence Force, members of the Police Department, teachers who make up a bulk of public officers. So when a review was done of those departments, we found that those were practically legitimate and so those were reinstated immediately except that as the minister said, they will not really realize it in their hands until the end of the month because allowances are paid once a month.”

McNab says the ministry is already seeing savings of over a hundred thousand dollars per month in allowances.