KUWAIT CITY, July 17: In its report for the 2022/2023 fiscal year, the State Audit Bureau revealed a number of financial and administrative violations and irregularities committed by the Public Authority for Manpower (PAM), which cost public money tens of millions of dinars, reports Aljarida daily. According to the report, the most prominent violations were evident in the debts of “employment support” and the disbursement of sums for years to those who are not eligible, in violation of the law. As per PAM’s data until March 5, 2023, those debts amounted to about KD 85.640 million, which were spent on 53,625 cases for 45,514 citizens, of whom 6,580 have more than one debt.

The report attributed this to the resignation of 33,608 workers from their employers without informing PAM, with a total value of KD 35.055 million. The number of debtors was 31,521, including 1,967 people with more than one indebtedness. The total indebtedness of violations related to support disbursement for citizens who combine work and study amounted to KD 36,129 million, which was spent on 5,655 people, i.e. 4,784 debtors with 706 of them having more than one debt, in violation of the Cabinet’s decision regarding granting social aid and children’s allowance.

The report affirmed that the period of disbursement of subsidy to an individual in violation, without the PAM officials noticing, amounted to 139 continuous months (nearly 12 years) without listing it in the automated systems, adding that the authority also stopped collecting some debts even though six years had passed since the last collection. The report explained that there are companies manipulating labor support through fictitious employment of citizens, draining millions of dinars from the state treasury unjustly and in crude and crooked ways. Two companies were discovered to have appointed some imaginary citizens to obtain labor support. The number of workers in one of them reached 119 with debts worth more than one million dinars owed to PAM. The number of workers in the other company reached 327.