AUDIT
109
6.
The Director of Colonial Audit has strongly represented that Audit Officers should in the earlier years of their service be granted the same scale of salary as Administrative Officers. He points out that Audit Officers are now recruited from the same general field as Administrative Officers, and that candidates for appointment to the Audit Department are required to conform generally to the same stan- dard of personality and educational attainment. The Audit Service offers a less interesting career and less favourable ultimate pros- pects of promotion than the Administrative Service, and if to these disadvantages is added a lower scale of remuneration in the early stages, the prospects of recruiting Audit Officers of the required stamp, par- ticularly when normal conditions return, will be seriously jeopardised.
In these circumstances it is proposed that Audit Officers should be placed on the same initial scale of salary as Administrative Officers. On the other hand the promotion bar is placed at the normal point in the standard "Ordinary Civil" scale, viz: £750, and the scale applicable to the next higher grade viz. that of Senior Assistant Auditor is placed at £780 - £900. These proposals have been made with reference to the special position of Audit Officers. The Colonial Audit Depart- ment, of which they are members, is a single organised service under the general direction of the Director of Colonial Audit, which covers most Colonial dependencies, and Audit Officers in general have much greater opportunities in the ordinary course of events for promotion by transfer than officers in other departments, and expect in the course of their service to be moved more frequently. Audit appointments are for the purposes of the common service divided into four classes, and it is desirable in the interests of the Service generally that appointments
in the second class, which comprise most of the less highly paid auditorships, & the deputy auditorships should be filled by officers who have had an opportunity of demonstrating their capacity in posts carrying greater responsibilities than those normally allocated to assistant auditors in East Africa; such intermediate posts form Class III of the Colonial Audit Department.
On this basis it is apparent, in the first place that it is necessary that there should be a sufficient number of appointments in Class III to provide a reasonable flow of promotion for officers in Class IV, and in the second place that the general level of remunera- tion attached to Classes II, III and IV respectively should bear such relation to one another that promotion from one class to the next will ordinarily involve a definite financial advantage. For this purpose it is essential that the East African salary scheme should provide for a grade of senior assistant auditors with a scale of salary appropriate to Class III, i.e. superior to the scale applicable to officers in Class IV of the Service, but with a maximum which (taking into account the provision of free quarters in East Africa) will not render appoint- ments in Class II of the Service financially unattractive.
The scale proposed for audit officers has been framed with special regard to these considerations.
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