By- Aruna Rashed Toma Bangura

The former Assistant Director of Procurement of the Ministry of Basic and Secondary School Education who was offered another employment in the Sierra Leone Free Education Project Secretariat has been ordered to refund the total salary of Le118, 063,086 into the consolidated revenue fund.

The report states that the former employee of MBSSE continued to receive salaries for three month which are January, February and March of 2021. And the report disclosed that double salaries were paid to the former employee of MBSSE as he collected Le118, 063,086 and Le89, 302,140 from both the Ministry and SLFEP respectively.

The MBSSE responded to the audit team that the audit recommendation has been noted and that the former Assistant Director of Procurement had refunded salaries paid into his account by the government when he had already signed contract for secondment and evidence of payment is available for verification.

However, the Auditors responded that the issues still remains unresolved as evidence of salary refund into the Consolidated Fund was not submitted for audit verification.

The report also disclosed that the auditors observed that eight staff of the project received salaries above the advised salary range and this cost the project extra salary burden of US$74,100. The audit team recommended that the SPS of the MBSSE should be held accountable for awarding contracts to these officers whose salaries are above the range scale authorized by MoF.

It could be recalled that on 10th May 2019, the Ministry of Finance issued a letter to all vote controllers of selected ministries, team leads, coordinators and managers of selected projects informing them about the harmonized salary range for project officers.