ISLAMABAD - Chairman National Accountability Bureau Qamar Zaman Chaudhry Thursday chaired a monthly coordination meeting of the Bureau to review latest progress on the decisions taken in the previous meeting. He said the Bureau committed to curb corruption with iron hands by adopting a zero-tolerance policy to the scourge.
The meeting was held in NAB headquarters and all senior officials and DGs of different wings also attended the meeting.
During the meeting, the chairman said that NAB has filed more than 150 corruption references in the respective Accountability Courts and recovered Rs50 billion from the corrupt people.
He said due to effective coordination of the Operations Division and Prosecution Division of NAB, the overall conviction ratio in respective Accountability Courts is about 76 per cent which is a remarkable achievement of any investigation agency in investigation of white collar crimes.
He said that NAB has devised Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) to rationalise the workload and timelines have been prescribed for efficient, effective and expeditious disposal of cases putting a maximum limit of 10 months- from complaint verification-to-inquiry-to-investigation and finally to a reference in the Accountability Court.
He said that through detailed introspection and analysis of organisational weaknesses, overhaul of procedures and business processes, all pillars of the organization i.e. Operations, Prosecution, Human Resource Development and Awareness and Prevention have been reactivated.
He said that an effective Internal Accountability Mechanism (IAM) is placed in NAB to weed out such officers/officials who proved to be involved in corruption and misconduct.
He said that NAB has devised a comprehensive Quantified Grading System in NAB to review and monitor the performance of NAB regional Bureaus on annual basis. Under Quantified Grading System, NAB Regional Bureau’s are being evaluated for the last three years on annual basis at a given criteria which has proved very successful and the performance of NAB’s Regional Bureaus is increasing day by day due to regular monitoring and inspection.
He said that Pakistan’s ranking improved by four points from 126th to 122nd position in the Annual Global Competitiveness Report of World Economic Forum 2016-17.
He said that Global Competitiveness Index of World Economic Forum is very encouraging for Pakistan which would help improving Pakistan's image among the community of nations.
The chairman NAB said that NAB is a complaint driven organisation. NAB has taken a new initiative named “Citizen Friendly NAB” to reach out to the complainants and to cater their complaints submitted to NAB about corrupt for further information regarding the status of their complaints for effectively utilising the modern and effective technology to create better interaction with citizen. Under “Citizen Friendly NAB” initiative, existing Monitoring and Evaluation System (MES) has generated a system-based on complaint registration acknowledgement system to share the information with complainant and Unique Identification Number (UIN).