Addis Fortune (Addis Ababa)
Yohannes Anberbir
26 August 2008
The implementation of the Business Process Reengineering (BPR) study has continued to rock employees of the newly established Revenue and Customs Authority (RCuA). The restructuring has, for the second week in a row, impacted on an additional 37 employees who were given forced leave.
The study, which earlier led to merger of the three revenue collecting institutions - the Ethiopian Customs Authority, the Federal Inland Revenue and their regulator body, the Ministry of Revenue into a single authority - has also unseated two directors of the authority, sending a warning signal to almost the entire staff.
Before the three institutions were combined, they used to have close to 3,000 employees in total.
G. Mariam Fanta and Goitom G. Tsadik were appointed a month earlier as directors in the Tax Collection Department, but on August 15, 2008, a notice was posted up that stated that the two new appointees, along with 35 other employees, were to go on forced leave.
They were also requested to hand over all the authority's properties within six days, before going on annual leave. The notice also requested the affected employees to wait until further decisions on their fate had been made.
What is troubling is the decision to grant employees like G. Mariam and Goitom forced leave right after being given new assignments as a result of the same study.
Abebe Kebede, communication director of the authority, told Fortune that the fate of these employees has yet to be decided.
"Yes, their might be individuals who were appointed according to the BPR, what is new if an institution gives annual leave to its employees? It doesn't mean they are fired," he said.
But the action of the authority has spread anxiety among its employees. Employees who had been given new positions not within the restructuring framework told Fortune that they did not know whether or not they would be allowed to continue working in the authority.
The merger of the three revenue collecting institutions and all this restructuring is due to government's attempt to boost its revenue from local sources to 30 billion Br in the next budget year, which would translate to an eight per cent increase.
According to information obtained from the authority, around 80pc of the federal revenue has been collected from these government institutions.
Following the endorsement of the proclamation that established the authority, it began laying off some employees. A week earlier, it laid off 89 of them from its Kality branch.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 Addis Fortune. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
