Niger State govt discovers 2,000 ghost workers on its payroll

Posted by admin Niger, State News Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011

Niger State Head of Service, Alhaji Ibrahim Matane, on Wednesday, revealed that the ongoing verification of staff in the civil service had shown that of the over 34,000 workforce 2,000 were ghost workers.
Matane also said that the committee was investigating e-payment irregularities against 4,700 workers.

The Head of Service made these known in Minna while addressing a press conference after the state executive council meeting, adding that over 2,300 names had been discovered to have been repeated several times with variations on the salary bills allocated to the names.

“As a responsible government, we will do everything to protect the interest of civil servants and as such we have seen that the issue of repeated names represents 2,300 extra names,” he said.

“We asked top government officials to produce their staff strength for verification and when the submissions were made, the committee now compared the names of what was submitted as staff list against what we have on our payroll and that is how we were able to come up with 4700 names.”

While allaying the fears of affected civil servants that those pencilled down for investigation would be retrenched, Matane maintained that most of them were genuine workers who were not captured accurately due to transfer and other reasons.

Matene, however, explained all those concerned must submit themselves for investigation, adding that until they did so they would be identified as non-existent in the state civil service.

He added that the state government was currently contending with a monthly wage bill of N1.4 billion for 34,000 civil servants, adding that the number included ghosts who must be fished out.

The head of service revealed that the state government would investigate the matter to get to the bottom of the irregularities, adding that whoever was found guilty in the matter would be dealt with according to the law.

-Tribunewp_posts