Muscat: The State Audit Institution (SAI) issued the Annual Report 2022 in which it highlighted the results of the financial and administrative audit of some government units, authorities, investment, and companies subject to its audit after fulfillment of the followed procedures with those entities.
The Community Brief of the annual report also highlighted some discrepancies in the practices of health professionals in both private and public sectors.
The report highlighted the fact of the assignment of training activities to training and marketing institutions without verifying their ability to fulfill their contractual obligations, the Ministry of Labour said it has a quality control team that evaluates training institutions to verify their ability to fulfill their contractual obligations before contracting with them.
There have been cases of non-compliance of some companies to employ the trainees after the completion of training programs, resulting in payment of amounts for training contracts without fully optimizing such programs.
A clause in the training contract obligates companies to employ the trainees. Non-compliant companies are banned, and financial payments are frozen in case of non-completion of recruitment procedures, whereas non-compliant institutes are blacklisted. A special team is dedicated to conducting quality checks to verify the companies’ ability to pay the salaries of their workers and check on the stability level of such companies as well as ensure that they have entities/
It was found that dismissal of some citizens after the end of training and appointment period due to contract expiration, project completion, or arbitrary dismissal resulted in placing additional burdens on the Job Security Fund, although the concerned companies have gained several benefits, including more opportunities to obtain permits to recruit expatriate workers, and benefiting from national manpower while charging their training cost to the State’s General Budget.
The Ministry has placed solutions to such challenges in the contracts of oil, gas, and construction companies by transferring employees to other companies, whereby the companies are signed to transfer the national labor to other locations in the event of project completion.
As for other sectors, the company's financial stability and the appropriate number of individuals called for training are currently being considered in accordance with the concluded contract.
The status of the trainee in the Ministry’s e-system is identified as an employee during the training period. Thus, the trainee is blocked in the system immediately after signing and registering the contract of training coupled with employment or on-the-job training, resulting in depriving the trainee of job opportunities in case of noncommitment of those establishments to appoint him at the end of the training period
The situation has been remedied to allow trainees to apply for labor market job opportunities that are not funded by the government.
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