ISLAMABAD: The Federal Directorate of Education (FDE) has requested the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to help it trace the missing files of employees who were appointed by the previous government.

A source said the FDE sent a letter to the agency requesting it to also start an investigation against seven senior officials of the directorate for not maintaining or deliberately removing the record of over 500 teaching and non-teaching staff.

He said during the PPP tenure, a parliamentary sub-committee headed by the then senior minister, Khurshid Shah, regularised the services of around 3,000 teaching and non-teaching staff in various schools and colleges. Around 800 regularised employees could not be adjusted so far as they were appointed without creating seats, the source added.

These daily-wage employees have been staging protest demonstrations for regularisation of their services. The source said when the incumbent director general of the FDE, Aamir Ashraf Khawaja, tried to go through the files and records of the daily wagers and those who were regularised during 2011-12, he was told that hundreds of files were ‘missing’.

FIA requested to probe seven officers for allegedly removing files from record

The DG requested the FIA to take action against seven officers who worked at the admin wing during 2011-13.

An officer in the FDE claimed that these seven officers enjoyed top postings at the admin wing from 2011 to 2013 and played a major role in illegal appointments. Later, to conceal their crime, they got the files removed from the record.

On the other hand, a source at the admin wing said: “We believe that from day one there was no official record of the hundreds of employees as they were directly appointed in the name of regularisation of services.”

When contacted, a spokesman for the FDE neither confirmed nor denied the development.

“I can’t say anything about this issue, you may contact the DG,” he said. However, one of the seven officers confirmed that the DG had forwarded their names to the FIA.

“Before sending the case to the FIA, our view point should have been recorded. We have nothing to do with the missing files,” he claimed and added that hundreds of employees had directly approached the parliamentary sub-committee for the regularisation of their services during the previous government.

Published in Dawn, January 17th, 2015

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