TWENTY-FOUR employees of the National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA), including two managers, were fired yesterday and another 14 are to lose their jobs at the end of next month as the state-run agency moves to cauterise losses it said resulted from abuse of its supplementary fleet billing system.

There will also be a revamping of its operations and documenting procedures, NSWMA officials said.

The shake-up comes in the wake of the recent discovery of suspected fraud in the authority’s billing system for independent garbage contractors. The discrepancies were discovered after an extensive internal audit and led to 50 contractors being suspended two weeks ago. Twenty-eight were later reinstated.

Alston Stewart, NSWMA executive chairman, told journalists yesterday that the audit had uncovered weaknesses in the dispatch, inspection and disposal system, as well as in the authority’s accounting procedures.

The audit, Stewart added, specifically fingered the accounts department, dispatchers, scale house operators, and the public cleansing department for a litany of weaknesses, including inadequate reports, wrong weighing, collusion with unscrupulous contractors, forgery, a lack of proper budgeting and low levels of worker education.

“There was extortion at the (Riverton) landfill in terms of jacked-up billing and pressure to determine who gets work,” Stewart told journalists

Among the measures being put in place to prevent a recurrence of the problems, according to the audit, are:

* improved scheduling systems;

* a revision of the dispatchers vehicle check-out form;

* recruitment of better trained personnel; and

* better tracking of payments and cross checking of invoices, among others.

However, the agency is yet to determine how much money was misappropriated, although it admits to paying out $6.5 million of a possible $12 million in back money to the independent contractors.

Stewart said internal probes were continuing and the fraud squad has been called in so that the police may deal with any criminal matters that may arise.

In the report of the systems and operations committees, which was circulated to the media yesterday, it was revealed that the NSWMA’s system “was poorly designed and what was in place was manipulated and poorly managed”.

“Those who operated in it did little to improve the system,” the report said. “It is the opinion of the committee that the present personnel proved that they are incapable of operating the system based on the revised standards which were implemented last year.”

The discovery of the irregularities was accompanied by a huge fire at the Riverton landfill, apparently set by arsonists, who were in solidarity with the contractors who, at the time, were embroiled in a payment dispute with the NSWMA about outstanding retroactive payments. The massive fire blackened the sky and polluted the air across a wide swathe of the Corporate Area.

Yesterday, Stewart rejected contractors’ claims, made when the issue became public a few weeks ago, that they were owed up to three months’ pay for work done.

“All the contractors who were suspended obviously had money owed to them, because the payment is made retroactively, we do not pay in advance,” he said. “They claimed we had three months’ payment, that’s not really true, some payments were not made for as long as three months, but it was really for a maximum of six weeks’ work (that they were owed).”