Twenty-nine-year-old Hamza Bouchkioua’s government salary has been suspended for more than four months because, on paper, he is has two government jobs. Bouchkioua moved from one job to another and resigned from the first job before assuming the second, but due to a communication failure, the resignation letter sent by his previous employer did not reach the MoL and his name is still on the payroll of both entities.

Twenty-nine-year-old Hamza Bouchkioua’s government salary has been suspended for more than four months because, on paper, he is has two government jobs. Bouchkioua moved from one job to another and resigned from the first job before assuming the second, but due to a communication failure, the resignation letter sent by his previous employer did not reach the MoL and his name is still on the payroll of both entities.

At another time  in Libya, Bouchkioua’s case may have gone unnoticed but in an attempt to curb the problem of Libyans cashing in on two jobs, the MoL developed the Job Duplication Program at the beginning of 2015, using national identity numbers and formed a regulatory committee headed by the GNC financial committee.

Adel Ghazal, Director of the Documentation and Information Center (DIC) at the Ministry of Finance (MoF), says there are currently 96,000 cases of job duplication. Another 4,000 jobs have been identified as having double national numbers but they cannot be considered as job duplications until figuring out their occupiers using the documentation provided by them.

But in cases like Bouchioua’s, some innocent employees have been penalised. “Not all the job duplication cases detected after introducing the national numbers are real,” insists Bouchkioua. “The deficiency of the public administration bodies has caused many innocent people to be accused of fraud.”

This is my right

Bouchkioua’s story is just one of thousands of cases of people standing in long queues in front of the job duplication verification committees at the DIC. This year, MoF has detected more than 100,000 cases of people holding down two jobs under the same national identification number. Forty-thousand cases have been settled and the settlement process continues for any employee giving up one of the two jobs.

Sharif Bin Jaber, 43, did not deny that he had two government positions: “As long as salaries are low and prices are on the rise, I and others are forced to do this to survive,” he says.

Bin Jaber has worked for 22 years in the National Commission for Scientific Research and during the 2011 revolution he joined one of the security brigades “legalised” by the Ministry of Defense which gave him a job number and a “good salary” until May 2015.

Bin Jaber figured that his salary from the security job was not related to the public sector, but after introducing the job duplication system, his salary was suspended. “It is normal, under the current circumstances, that the negligent government considers it as a violation to its laws.”

Double the real number

Abdulhamid Boujlida, DIC Director clarified that this is because of the huge number of job duplication cases which, he says, exceeded two million at different state institutions.

Boujlida expects that by 2016, the Center will have finished a comprehensive, financial database covering the entire public administration. Initial results show that this system will save the state budget six billion Libyan dinars (47.7 billion US dollars) off the payroll, which amounted to 24 billion Libyan dinars (5.17 billion US dollars) by the end of last year.

Mohamed Salil, Head of the Libyan Labor Organisation says that, according to a MoL report submitted to the General National Congress, the number of the public administration employees amounts to 1,250,000.

Salil says the number was 2.5 million before introducing the Job Duplication Program. Based on the joint vision of the Ministries of Labour and Finance, he expects that this number will drop to 900,000 by the end of 2016.

Causes of delay

What officials see as success in reducing the job duplication cases is seen by those who are standing in the DIC queues as disappointment and disregard for their situations since their salaries were suspended without considering the long time needed to tackle their situations.

The delay is caused by the lack of coordination and the poor performance of the post companies, the long distance and the unstable security situation on the roads to Tripoli. Ramadan Abdullah, head of the labor office in Al-Harabat (west of Tripoli), says these obstacles delay the job duplication cases. His task is to review the measures referred from his office.

Abdullah says the problems will be solved soon, yet he is surprised by employees who claim the right to take two salaries, knowing that they are disbursed from the public budget.

Employees sometimes make mistakes

Sometimes simple human error leads to duplications. Mohamed Sanouka, 38, whose number was entered twice by mistake led to him having two jobs and forced him to go to the Center to correct the mistake, which might lead to suspending his salary, his sole source of income.

Ghazal at  MoL did not deny the occurrence of such mistakes. He says that the lack of concentration while entering the national numbers may lead to salary suspension by mistake.

However, Ghazal is optimistic about “the great success of the job duplication system”. With a broad smile, he reassures the crowds of petitioners that it will take only one week to refer the cases to the DIC at the MoF, and that they can follow up online.

Figures and statistics

This committee, Ghazal says, managed to overcome a huge deal of administrative measures especially since the settlement forms were distributed by the Monitoring Authority, which hugely cut the processing time.

The system’s latest data show that 26,300 cases are being settled, of which 22,300 have been checked, verified and referred to the MoF for payment; 360 cases are being checked; 2,753 are waiting for the DIC data; and 1,188 cases have been returned to the labor offices due to incomplete procedures.

The first phase of the job duplication verification work will be completed by the end of 2016 and the following phase will target the employees of the banking sector and the state-owned enterprises.