The bank's executive team, which recently visited Pakistan, was unable to meet the chairman of pay and pension committee, Chaudhry Moeen Afzal.
The bank's experts were providing technical assistance to the actuarial office for over a year and the actuarial office recently prepared the interim report that was submitted to pay and pension committee, an official told Business Recorder.
The bank had provided $61 million to the government for training and restructuring of the top bureaucracy according to the requirements of modern times, he said.
According to the official, the mission had several concerns about the recommendations being proposed in this report, specifically over the fiscal savings being projected by the actuarial assessment were overstated; that the parametric reforms were somewhat marginal; and that the costing of the reform proposals was marginal and incomplete.
The aide memoir further said that the team expressed concern over the extent to which provincial governments have been brought into the process and work of the actuarial office. The actuarial office report states: "Progress on civil service restructuring and creation of National Executive Service (NES) has been slow.
The establishment division and the civil service reform unit (CSRU) has proposed to pilot, in Basic Pay Scale (BPS) 19 and 20 of the federal secretariat, the creation of an open stream based upon merit and with improved transfer flexibility amongst various divisions and departments," says the report submitted to the bank head office.
It further states that it was not clear to what extent this policy had been approved by the government and that when it would be implemented.
In addition, the CSRU also planned to undertake wider studies on the detailed design of the NES taking into account the lessons learned from the introduction of the new stream.
The report states that it appears that the creation of broader NES as originally envisaged has met significant internal opposition in which it has been seen as elitist, evoking similar concerns to those raised by the district management group (DMG).
The proposed CSRU pilot, if restricted to senior secretariat cadre grades only, may demonstrate that the fears about elitism are warranted but without having the benefit of developed and more managerially senior executive," the report added.
The bank hopes that actuarial office would share database with the mission used to make projections of reform options and that the bank's experts were ready to travel to Pakistan and work with the pay and pension committee to develop reform options that could be implemented to achieve short-term targets and also to work on a long-term pension reform strategy with the finance ministry.