The Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC) on Monday announced that it will soon put brakes on several allowances given to state officers.
SRC’s new directive will have wide-ranging implications and will affect civil servants across various job groups working in different Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs).
Some of the allowances that will cease to be payable include; plenary sitting allowance, ministerial allowance and taxable car allowance.
Others include; retreat allowance, sitting allowance for institutional internal committees and taskforce allowance for institutional internal committees.
Speaking to Kenyans.co.ke, an official at SRC stated that the six allowances had already ceased to be payable.
This comes even as Members of Parliament in August 2022 threatened to disband SRC, after the commission proposed to abolish the plenary sittings allowance for lawmakers and Members of the County Assembly (MCAs).
The MPs argued that this would greatly affect their income as they are paid allowances for a minimum of four sittings per week.
According to SRC's circular issued on August 2023, the retreat allowance is paid to public officers who participate in special assignments. The allowance is strictly allocated to state officers who develop and produce policy documents away from their offices.
While abolishing the allowance, SRC issued the justification that a staffer's capabilities are established during the recruitment phase, hence the need for extra allowances that don't offer value for taxpayer money doesn't make sense.
SRC further argued that paying sitting allowances to Members of Institutional Internal Committees on top of their basic salary amounts to double compensation.
“Internal institution taskforces are constituted to execute the mandate of the institution,” SRC stated.
In June 2023, President William Ruto stated that SRC should look for ways to slash salaries for high-ranking state officers to cut down the country's ballooning wage bill.
