Muscat – As per the report shared by SAI with The Arabian Stories, one of the key issues identified was the lack of a data classification policy within the Ministry, which violates relevant laws and regulations. This deficiency poses a serious security risk to sensitive data.

“Some employees were granted powers for tasks unrelated to their departments, such as Government Recruitment, Ejada and Mawrid Plus Systems, resulting in the use and abuse of those powers to approve transactions by employees not authorized to carry out the transaction procedures,” stated the Community Brief.
To address this, “The Ministry will adhere to classifying data in databases as per the aforementioned legislation,” it added.
Additionally, the SAI discovered that some employees at the Ministry had been granted excessive powers for tasks outside their designated departments. This could potentially lead to the misuse of these powers and the approval of unauthorized transactions. The Ministry has taken corrective action by revoking these unnecessary privileges.

The SAI’s review of the Central Recruitment System also revealed several shortcomings. “Many observations were found during the audit and trial of the Central Recruitment System, some of which led to: Competing for jobs in violation of their issued vacancy announcements. Allowing non-qualified competitors to enter the test. The system allows access to the test by the same candidate civil ID from more than one computer,” stated the report.

“The feature of system change tracking was turned off in the spreadsheets. Insert of random specializations for candidates that do not match their actual specializations. Repeated rejection of job applicants due to mismatch of their qualifications with the specialization required for the job, despite they are actually compatible,” it noted.

The ‘Action Taken’ section states: “Some observations were corrected, and other observations are being corrected.”