Civil servant ‘held three full-time jobs simultaneously’

26 comments

1. So when MPs do it the Times are fine with it, but when civil servants do it, the times get’s upset.

2. Maybe if UK salaries weren’t so piss poor people would be happy working just one job.

3. Many of our richest manage to be directors of more than 3 companies.

   Frankly if you can hold down 3 full time jobs and get all 3 jobs done to a decent standard let em be. If performance suffers then fire them. Not bloody rocket science.

4. Journalists are such hacks ffs. The article ends with them talking about WFH for two paragraphs despite that having nothing to do with the case.

5. Can’t believe people are actually defending this guy who is basically stealing from us (well, those of us who pay tax).

6. MPs doing this is fine, a regular person doing the same is fraud?

   I despise this country sometimes

7. Can’t see the article but I don’t believe in the stealing employers time argument people have against this

   If we are paid for our time and not for our skills then definitionally we should be paid for the random emails outside of work hours and last minute change ups and the many time consuming things that aren’t directly financially compensated.

   If we are paid for our skills and not our time then it shouldn’t matter what one can do in their excess Hours

8. Many employment contracts now prevent you funnily enough, even when you do a nmw job . MPs are not prevented despite the country literally visibly falling apart at the seams and getting more than renumerated.

   Fk that. I do second jobs

9. Much of taxpayers Covid furlough spend went on public sector workers getting furloughed and then taking second jobs, instead of them being seconded. This meant the tax payer paid them twice! Good gig if you could get it.

10. This is hilarious, especially the term “polygamous working”. If he’s failing at his job, fire him. The reality is most full time jobs in government, tech, and many other areas are woefully inefficient and can be done part time.

11. If he was actually doing the jobs then the issue isn’t really that he’s scamming the tax payer (someone was going to get paid those salaries, so no one is out of pocket), the issue is that civil service is so inefficient and wasteful that it’s possible to hold down 3 full time jobs and do them all.

12. Should give him a fourth job as an an efficiency consultant. Test out civil service jobs, see if you can do a weeks worth of work in 1 day and then cut a load of staff but pay them more.

13. This is less about working 3 jobs and more about lying to Government agencies all of which require security clearance that you’re a civil servant somewhere else.

    Contractors will have multiple gigs on the go.

14. If he’s good enough to deliver 3 jobs at the same time, give the guy a pay rise! Also suggests it’s really easy to get away with doing very little in the civil service/council.

15. I mean civil service pay is shit I had a friend who was a EO and had a 2nd declared job working in a bar on evenings on weekends just to keep afloat each month and it was literally just. This was pre covid BTW but can’t blame the guy – the stories he shared with me of what some civil servants endure and for the pay is something else.

16. If one person can do more than one full time job then they are not full time jobs. Why do we have so many governmental jobs being paid full time that are clearly part time?

17. Revealing that you can have three full time civil service jobs at once without clear knowledge of which were on a WFH basis and ultimately the thing that got him nicked was not the fact he did not turn up for work or produce anything but rather some opaque general data analysis that caught a discrepancy around his wage.

18. IF anything shows how underworked parts of the the public sector are.

19. Hardly surprising, there’s a hell of a lot of non jobs in the civil service, a bunch of jobs a full time office dogsbody could do, but they split the things up between 10 different people and they spend most of the day doing naff all.

20. The problem here seems to be more that he exposed how little effort is actually required in these dossy civil service jobs rather than him working more than one of them.

    Anecdotally every civil servant I know has mentioned at one time or another how much of a piss take their job is, pity they have the government by the balls.

21. I thought we meant to be celebrating this sort of productivity, seeing as they want us all working well beyond the current pension age.

22. Imagine the outrage when the newspapers discover their favourite politicians often hold four or five jobs.

23. For those unable to see the story (despite the archived link available) – main extracts are below

    I assume people defending him and saying ‘who cares’ are not tax payers. But yes I would also be looking at the standards of his managers who failed to pick up that he wasn’t putting in ‘full time’ effort in each job. People started working from home due to covid in March/April 2020 – but within a few months managers should have been picking up if people weren’t doing enough (or a whole lot of civil servants in those roles need to improve their performance if this guy can properly do 3 jobs at once). It does lend support to those that claim the public sector has a lot of fat to be trimmed.

    *Kashim Chowdhury, who is accused of lying about his employment to six government bodies, denies all charges*

    *Kashim Chowdhury, 54, is accused of working full-time at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and Tower Hamlets council.*

    *He is accused of lying about his employment to six government bodies from 2020 to 2023, including the Home Office and the Department for Business and Trade.*

    *Chowdhury, of Whitechapel, east London, is also accused of defrauding the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), the Food Standards Agency (FSA) and Venn Group, a recruitment firm acting on behalf of East London NHS Trust.*

    *Southwark crown court heard that between June 2020 and June 2022 Chowdhury allegedly committed fraud by making a false representation to Defra that he had stopped working at Tower Hamlets council on June 15, 2020.*

    *He is also accused of telling the council between April 2021 and June 2022 that he had no additional employment and of telling Venn he was not “providing services to any other third party” during his contracted hours.*

    *Additionally, Chowdhury is accused of making a false representation to Defra that he was not “impeded in fulfilling” his contracted hours. He also allegedly told DHSC, the Home Office and the trade department he was not already a civil servant.*

24. And I can’t find one cushy civil servant job..greedy bastards.

25. If your manager can’t tell you’re working 2 other jobs IMO I don’t feel like this is the employees failing.

26. Reminds me of a guy I used to work with. He would clock in with us, go work a shift at a nearby warehouse, come back and clock out. Got away with it for a couple of years.

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