Borno State governor, Kashim Shettima, has revealed how senior civil servants in the state colluded with commercial banks to defraud the state with the use of fake bank accounts.
The governor said the fraudulent workers mobilised people to pose as civil servants and open salary accounts.
The respective ATM cards for the accounts were thereafter transferred to the top officials who used them for monthly withdrawals.
“These crop of senior civil servants would own dozens of such ATMs with which they use to collect salaries on behalf of these ghost workers,” the governor said while speaking to journalists on the ongoing salary verification controversy that has stalled the salary of workers for July.
“We have been able to uncover how some civil servants would give some persons just N2000 to open accounts as civil servants and bring the ATM to them. Some have up to 40 of such ATM cards for salary accounts with them.
“Now that the banks are helping us to expose the criminals, we have warned that any of them that collude with any top shot in the civil service will have the full weight of the laws descending on them. We’re going to delist them from the list of banks from our service,” the governor said.
He said the verification of workers had helped the state to uncover the fraud going on in the civil service.