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Polly Hui

The Secretary for the Civil Service promised yesterday to investigate a case where a widow swept her husband's empty grave for 18 years before being told by the government that the remains had been exhumed.

Joseph Wong Wing-ping  told an RTHK radio show he would not be lenient if staff at the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department were found to be accountable.

'A large tree would naturally have some dead branches. With over 100,000 civil servants and so many departments in the government, problems are inevitable,' Mr Wong said.

'But it does not mean that we do not care about the problems. Each year, we punish over 1,000 civil servants and terminate the employment of more than 100 staff,' Mr Wong said, adding that an effective appraisal and punishment mechanism existed to ensure black sheep were justly punished.

The widow's case was revealed by the ombudsman on Thursday. The watchdog also found several cases of unpunished illegal burial or grave 'recycling', where one person's remains were removed and replaced with another's.

'I personally feel very unhappy about this. I believe the government should apologise to the families,' he said.

He admitted that the investigation's findings, announced after the government released a proposal to freeze rather than cut civil servants' pay, came at a bad time. Annette Lee Lai-yee,  the deputy director of food and environmental hygiene, admitted on an RTHK radio show yesterday that there was room for improvement in the management of cemeteries.

'We believe that one case is already too many. We want to apologise to the families in these cases,' she said. Although the department carried out regular patrols on the cemeteries, Ms Lee said it was difficult to monitor every corner of the sites because they covered too large an area. They also encountered problems in tracing the original applicant for burial services in some instances because their records dated as far back as 50 years.

Ms Lee said the department was considering introducing a registration system for grave workers to deter illegal burials or removals of remains.

'Our preliminary plan is to require all grave workers to wear staff cards and give the department advance notice before they work on any cemetery sites.

' We reserve the right to strike their names off the list if they break the rule,' she said.



Civil service chief vows retribution over grave recycling debacle