The government has mandated that all of its employees take part in an employee verification process by August 31 or face an interruption in their salaries. The exercise began last week.
According to a notice from the Public Treasury Department, employees must bring a Bahamian passport, Bahamian driver's license, National Insurance smart card or voter's card. All monthly and weekly employed public officers in The Bahamas, including people living overseas, senators and members of Parliament, are required to participate.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Dr. Hubert Minnis and Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Peter Turnquest led the verification process for members of Parliament.
It's clear why the government is trying to clear up its register. It wants to know that money paid to public workers is actually going to the people it is supposed to.
"We want to identify all of the legitimate workers in the civil service, including contract workers, so that at the end of the day we know our payroll is accurate and that we are not paying persons who are not engaged in actually working for the government," said Turnquest in an interview last week.
With somewhere between 55 percent and 60 percent of the government's money going to compensate workers, the verification process is an important step in reducing waste at a time when our debt-to-GDP has risen to the 70-percent range.
Businesses often conduct various re-verification processes with staff in order to update the information on file. What the government is doing is reasonable. Slackness and corruption must be rooted out.
Yet, there have been complaints.
Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) Senator Fred Mitchell has called on the government to rethink its "farcical" employee verification exercise. He said it is an "indignity" to require ordinary Bahamians to stand in a line to "prove who they are".
"Surely the government has taken leave of its collective senses," he said.
"As a matter of law, if someone works for their pay, there is no basis on which you can deny that person their pay.
"Also in this day and age, the government can surely be more sensitive and respectful than arranging yet another indignity for ordinary people standing on long lines to prove who they are."
Whenever people get jobs they have to provide information in order to be paid. Mitchell knows this. There is nothing wrong with an employer needing to refresh its information.
What we have here is another example of the PLP decision to criticize everything the government tries just for the hell of it. If the new government were to give milk to babies, the PLP would oppose. If the new government were to give books to public schools, the PLP would oppose.
Bahamians have complained for years that civil service reform is needed. Let the new administration try its hand at reform. Give it a chance to work. The role of the opposition is not to oppose everything. It is not to ridicule every initiative intended to make the country better.
If the PLP keeps releasing statements of opposition regardless of the merit of the initiative, the people will stop listening to the opposition. Its voice will be mere background noise.
The PLP is shell-shocked from its loss on May 10. We have said repeatedly that it should take a break. Go on vacation. Focus on reforming the party at the convention in October.
When the government is finished with this verification exercise we are curious as to what the results would be. It should inform the country of what it finds out.
We suspect it will be discovered that money was going to all kinds of places it should not have been going to.
We support efforts to reduce waste in the public sector. The Bahamian people support these efforts too. The government should ignore the words of the opposition and keep doing what it's doing.

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