Roughly 15,000 state employees may have been hired illegally, MPs announced Wednesday - the largest, most startling number yet in a burgeoning scandal over government hiring.
After a hearing of Parliament’s Finance and Budget Committee Wednesday, committee chair MP Ibrahim Kanaan announced the latest figures. “We found there are 15,200 employees and contractors who were employed or contracted outside the employment classification framework,” he said.
“This is a violation of the law.”
MP Alain Aoun, who is not on the committee but attended the hearing, later tweeted a more precise count: 15,102 employees out of 99,246 surveyed.
George Attieh, head of the Central Inspection Bureau, which investigated the hiring, told The Daily Star that the latter figure represented roughly 90 percent of civilian employees.
This would mean that the total size of the Lebanese civilian public sector is 110,000 “allowing for some variation,” he said, while previous estimates put the number at about double.
Attieh said the figures suggested more than 10 percent of the Lebanese public sector had been hired outside of legal norms.
Wednesday’s unexpected discovery on illegal hiring was made after the Finance and Budget Committee set out to investigate the employment of some 5,000 people during a hiring freeze that began in August 2017. It tasked the CIB with the probe. Much of the hiring was done in the run-up to the May 2018 parliamentary elections, allegedly as a means of vote buying.
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The committee is currently examining two reports - one from the CIB, and another from the Civil Service Board. Attieh Wednesday presented the committee with information on the state of Lebanon’s public sector, in which the 15,000 figure was revealed.
An alleged version of the CIB report published by the Lebanon Debate news website shows how the two figures - 5,000 and 15,000 - are related.
The former refers to illegal hires made after the August 2017 freeze.
The latter refers to state employees whose jobs may be illicit due to their lack of legal classification - regardless of when they were hired.
“The whole situation is crazy, the more we go into it, the more surprises we get,” MP Yassine Jaber, a member of the Finance and Budget Committee, told The Daily Star. “We’ve been pushing for years to get the whole picture ... now we’re starting to.” Attieh said that he had come across the 15,000 number during his investigation into the post-freeze hiring, based on a “personal initiative.”
He shared a document with The Daily Star that he had sent to all public administrations for the investigation, asking them to break down their numbers of total employees into the four official categories - which includes “employees” and “contractors” - as well as a fifth option labeled “other.”
The 15,000 figure is a compilation of the responses that fell into the “other,” category, he said, meaning those employees that were listed as anything other than what is recognized by the state.
He added that it was not clear how many of the 5,000 hired during the freeze overlapped with the 15,000 illegally classified employees, but that there was definitely some overlap, and the hirings were “illegal” in any case.
There are, however, some questions surrounding the basis for the numbers uncovered. Committee member MP Michel Moawad previously cautioned against taking the figures at face value.
A major issue comes down to the CIB’s lack of investigative resources. For instance, the CIB thus far has been “unable to determine the difference between new contracts and renewals” for certain employees, he said.
As has Nicolas Nahas, the committee’s No. 2, cautioned: “It’s not an accounting; it’s giving an idea.”
Attieh himself said that the 15,000 figure was initial, and “is as it was given to me from public institutions.” But rather than going down, he said it was likely the number would go up.
There are also questions over the 5,000 figure. Reports circulated Wednesday that of the 5,000, some 3,300 had been hired at the Education Ministry.
But Education Minister Akram Chehayeb denied this in an interview with local news channel MTV, explaining that most were scheduled to be hired ahead of the hiring freeze, and just happened to be employed after it.
Attieh acknowledged that the numbers on the Education Ministry were not yet confirmed.
Based on current figures, several MPs confirmed that the other main perpetrators of hiring post-August 2017 include the Telecommunications Ministry, via Ogero, and the Health Ministry, while the Energy and Foreign ministries also participated to a lesser extent.
“We know that hiring was done, now we are going to audit the numbers and the contracts, and determine the exact way in which it was done,” Attieh said.
Following Wednesday’s hearing, Kanaan announced that he had sent a letter to the Court of Audit to investigate the hirings, and that it had opened an investigation into the issue.
“We are heading for the judiciary in the hiring file. The first step is the Court of Audit and there will be further steps announced later,” Kanaan said.
The illegal hires have caused outrage as the state faces pressure to confront debt and a high budget deficit that have raised the specter of drastic financial and monetary consequences for the country.
Kanaan’s announcement also comes amid calls from lawmakers and politicians, notable among them ministers in the new Cabinet, for a comprehensive campaign against corruption in Lebanon’s governing class.
Wednesday’s session also was the first one attended by a minister for questioning over hiring at their ministry, with newly minted Social Affairs Minister Richard Kouyoumjian.
“The social affairs minister has not contracted or hired [anyone after august 2017], and has ended contracts with unneeded employees,” Kanaan announced afterwards.
MP Pierre Bou Assi, the former Social Affairs Minister, told The Daily Star: “I won’t hide that I was satisfied when it became clear to the committee that the ministry had respected the law to the letter, and that I had in fact ended 600 contracts which were no longer necessary.” Bou Assi noted these had been with some 400 people in a program tied to Syrian refugees, and 200 in an extreme poverty program, both of which he said were defunct.
A session will be called later for Health Minister Jamil Jabak since he failed to attend Wednesday’s session, Kanaan said, and Chehayeb is set to head to the committee Tuesday.
