According to data recently made public by employment platform Randstad, more than 1.4 million people missed work every day in the first quarter of 2024. This absence causes losses equivalent to 6.7% of the total hours worked in the economy.

Although it is one of the highest figures in recent years, it pales in comparison to the absenteeism of Italian civil servant Salvatore Scumace, according to the local newspaper. Corriere della CalabriaHe spent 15 years not going to work and religiously collecting his monthly salary.

Ghost worker. Salvatore Scumace has started In 2005 he worked as a technical operator of the hospital’s fire emergency service at the Ciaccio hospital in Catanzaro (Italy), Apulia. Local newspaper in April 2021 Calabria’s C Newspublished the arrest of Scumace. The Italian Court of Auditors accused him of causing damage to the Public Treasury by illegally collecting 531,000 in salary for a job he had not held for 15 years. In addition to the crime of fraud, there were also charges of extortion and abuse of office, which explained his long absence.

He had threatened his superiors. Italy’s Court of Auditors ruled that Scumace’s absence was “highly malicious from the start”. The court noted that the hospital’s management was aware of his absence but chose not to act on it, “improperly making him pay the salary he had been receiving and benefiting from for over 15 years” just a few weeks ago.

As revealed in the legal process, the official had threatened the hospital board not to open a disciplinary case against Scumace. As time went on, that board retired and his replacement never knew of Scumace’s existence, although they continued to pay his monthly payroll.

Pay for your negligence. Beyond the threats made against management for trying to report the ghost worker, eight of the nine managers involved in the process of supervising hospital staff were charged with negligence and ordered to pay compensation to the hospital for the total amount of the salary paid to Scumace.

The ruling highlights that the negligent actions of former hospital officials, described as a “conspiracy”, facilitated the fraud committed by Scumace over three decades and allowed the official to continue receiving his salary without working for so long, according to the Italian news agency ANSA. According to the ruling, the officials allowed “public money to flow unjustly”.

Different levels of responsibilityThe decision recognises that not all officials who neglect their duties and allow fraud to occur have the same responsibility, and therefore sets out two levels of compensation that must be paid to the hospital if they leave office.

The “first link in the chain” was made up of the former head of the fire emergency operations center, the former head of the human resources area and the head of the company’s prevention and protection service. According to the Court of Accounts’ decision, “None of them asked who Scumace was, what he did, because – if he did not provide that service – it is unacceptable that a hospital director who was aware of this did not worry about it. Open an internal investigation and follow up on his actions.” They are liable to pay compensation of 531,000 euros to the hospital.

“The second link in the chain”, “accepts the responsibility of three former officials who, through their negligence, aimed to conceal Scumace’s absence (or at least accepted the risk) and thus caused the damage that continues to be inflicted little by little” to the state treasury. “This second group is being fined 381 thousand euros in hospital compensation.

The HR officer knew nothing.. Finally, the court found it unconvincing that the former head of human resources, who was tasked with overseeing the management of the workforce and the payroll, knew nothing about the payroll entered for an employee he had seen for 15 years. “I had the duty to verify whether Sccumace, whom everyone described as absent, continued to hold the position in his current staff role in order to be entitled to the monthly salary. It is unconvincing, if not highly probable, that anyone other than the person responsible for human resources would have known about the ghost employee,” the judges wrote in their decision.

Like Scumace, the former chief of staff was also fined 367,000 euros, which they must jointly pay to the hospital.

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Image | Unsplash (Martha Dominguez de Gouveia, Dario Morandotti)