A confidential report for the Government by German consultants show that over 2000,000 hours of staff overtime was booked by BEC employees during its 2009 financial year. That is equivalent to an astonishing one hour of overtime per day for every employee.
Describing this level of overtime as “questionable”, the study called “Strengthening the Energy Sector in the Bahamas” was part of an Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) funded project. More shocking, is the fact that during BEC’s 2008 financial year, the amount of booked overtime hours was “double” the 2009 total – meaning there were more than 400,000 hours of overtime booked.
“In 2008-2009, 210,000 thousand hours of overtime have been booked, which amounts to approximately one hour a day for every employee,” the Fichtner report on BEC’s operations noted. “The year before, volume was double that value. This volume is questionable even if the recruitment stop is taken into account.”
