The Public Service Commission has insisted that it is the selection boards’ responsibility to vet candidates’ eligibility to public sector posts.
Its statement came in response to an assertion by ophthalmologist Thomas Fenech, who chaired one of those boards, that it was the PSC’s job to establish candidates’ eligibility.
“Our job as a selection board is to determine the clinical eligibility of candidates, not to check whether they conform with all the various laws and procedures,” Mr Fenech had said.
The board he chaired was found by the PSC to have nominated a candidate to fill a medical consultancy post despite the candidate not being registered locally as a specialist. The appointment was revoked by the PSC.
Three other consultancy post nominations were also similarly criticised by the Commission, which annulled the selection processes.
In a strongly-worded statement, the PSC hit back at Mr Fenech’s suggestion that it was its own job to establish a candidate’s eligibility to a post.
“The Commission does not screen applications to determine who is or is not eligible....this is an important task of the selection board,” the statement read, adding that the PSC only decided on a candidate’s eligibility in cases of doubt.
“Most selection boards understand their role clearly: the selection boards for the consultancy posts in question were exceptions,” the PSC scolded.
Nor did the PSC compile lists of applicants or forward such lists to selection boards, a PSC spokesman added.
The PSC went one step further, noting how all the members of Mr Fenech’s board, including ophthalmologist and PL electoral candidate Franco Mercieca, had signed a declaration “to confirm that all the applicants who had been interviewed were eligible”.
It also addressed another claim concerning the presence – or lack thereof – of a civil servant on selection boards.
Medical Association of Malta president Martin Balzan had hinted that the PSC’s decision to remove civil servant representatives from selection boards could have played a part in causing the bungled consultancy selection processes.
Such representatives, the PSC has now explained, were officials “from a department with no connection to the vacancy to be filled”. The practice was discontinued in January 2010 as it was deemed ineffective.
The PSC dismissed the suggestion that having such officials on selection boards could have helped prevent the vacancy mix-up.
Given that the call for applications dealt with specialised medical requirements, “the Commission does not see how a panel member with no knowledge of the health sector could have assisted the selection board to interpret these clauses,” the statement noted.
The nomination of ineligible candidates to four medical consultancy boards, revealed in the PSC’s 2011 annual report, has become a hot political potato.
The Labour Party has noted that one of the posts was set to be filled by a relative of Education Minister Dolores Cristina and called for an investigation into the matter.
And the Nationalist Party yesterday wondered whether the Opposition would continue to allege corruption, now that it transpired that one of its own electoral candidates, Mr Mercieca, was one of the board members endorsing the selection.