LAHORE: Internal chaos has emerged in the manual record keeping of police department’s staff across the province, causing confusion about the actual number of personnel and vacancies.

According to official sources on Tuesday, the chaos emerged after the police department decided to digitise its staff data with the help of Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB). During the process, the department maintained that it had 17,000 vacancies, while the PITB said they were 31,000.

As this led to suspicions of a ghost force and beneficiaries within the department, the inspector general of police summoned all district heads of the department concerned to Lahore, making them calculate thoroughly the actual number of staff and vacancies.

Confusion over data on number of personnel, vacancies

Sources said the summoned officials had removed the flaws in the manual record. But it was still difficult to verify staff antecedents because of discrepancies in the National Database and Registration Authority record, which is checked through national identity card numbers and their identification through their belt numbers.

“Belt number is not an authentic source of identification as it varies from district to district. An official or officer transferred to another district is assigned a new belt number,” the sources said.

They said that to make record keeping of the police department’s staff accurate, it had now been asked to assign its personnel the accountant general (AG) office’s salary account number. The AG office maintained a digital record of all government employees through software given to it by the World Bank in 2003.

Published in Dawn, January 18th, 2017