No doubt the astronomical unemployment rate in the country today is in part exacerbated by the widespread incidence of ghost employees in both the Federal, State and Local governments’ administration.
As a direct consequence of this fraud, qualified Nigerians often find it difficult to get a space in both government and private establishments whose nominal rolls are brimming with fictitious characters but who nonetheless monthly cream out humongous pay checks from their victim organization. According to the May/June 2001 edition of the Fraud Magazine, “a ghost employee is simply someone on the payroll who doesn’t actually work for the victim company. Through the falsification of personnel or payroll records a fraudster causes pay checks to be generated to a ghost.” It added that a ghost employee may be a fictitious person or a real individual who simply doesn’t work for the victim employer. “When the ghost is a real person, it’s often a friend or a relative of the perpetrator.
“In order for a ghost employee scheme to work,” it said, “four things must happen: The ghost must be added to the payroll, timekeeping and wage rate information must be collected, a pay check must be issued to the ghost, and the check must be delivered to the perpetrator or an accomplice.”
Even though this fraudulent system has been embraced and maintained by highly placed civil servants across the country and for ages now, it is lamentable that no deterrence has been applied to cleans the system. For the perpetrators who annually cream off millions of naira from government coffers into their private pockets for work not done, the immoral and ungodly business continues to expand its cancerous territory. It had become so pervasive that it convulsed the entire bureaucracy in the country. All past attempts at curtailing the gorgon-medusa apparently failed as the perpetrators and their accomplice became more sophisticated and seemed always a step ahead of those charged with weeding them out.
For instance, the Federal Government recently revealed that about 23,846 ghost workers were discovered and have been removed from its payroll. For this action, the Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun, said about N2.293 billion was saved from the salary bill of the ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) for February 2016 when compared to December 2015 when the BVN audit process commenced. The minister said the ghost workers were uncovered in payrolls of various MDAs during the ongoing bank verification number (BVN)-based staff audit and enrolment to the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS). She noted that during the audit, names of some civil servants whose salaries were being processed were found to be inconsistent with those linked to the bank accounts into which salaries were paid. Individuals in this category, she hinted, were therefore found to have either been receiving salaries from multiple sources in different MDAs, or were ghost workers.
In a similar manner, the Benue State Government said it expends over N170million as salaries on ghost workers every month. Biometric Audit Consultant, Prince Mkpang, had given the indication when he submitted the Report of Biometric Audit of Benue Civil Service to Governor Samuel Ortom in Makurdi recently. According to Mkpang, after the Automatic Finger Print Identification, only 17,962 staff members were active employees in the state’s civil service. This he said were exclusive of the 1,011 judiciary staff members in the state. On his part, Gov. Ortom said government would look into the report and make necessary corrections for immediate implementation.
The Plateau State Government said it uncovered 5,000 ghost workers. Most interesting twist of the Plateau incidence was that the ghost worker included a Commissioner, who had hitherto expectedly sat in the State Executive Council sessions with the then State Governor, Jonah Jang. In Kano, over 8,000 ghost workers were said to have been discovered while Kebbi State said that 9,300 of such fictitious names have been uncovered from the nominal roll of its state work force. Former governor of Delta State Governor, Dr Emmanuel Uduaghan had also regretted the apparent failure of the bio-metric exercise conducted by some notable banks in the state. He had lamented that the existence of ghost workers within the folds of the state’s civil service had occasioned a bloated wage bill that the state government had had to shoulder. For Governor Yahaya Bello of Kogi State, the syndrome constitute one of the drain pipes of public funds in the state.
Speaking recently at a reception organized for him in Okene, headquarters of the Kogi Central Senatorial District, he decried the role of some officials of the state civil service, who he said are constituting a cog in the wheel of progress of the state. The governor revealed that the screening exercise conducted by a committee set up for that purpose had uncovered how a single person included “as many as 300 ghost workers in the payroll of a local government” at the detriment of development of the council area.
On his part, Governor Rochas Okorocha of Imo State has placed the dwindling financial health of the state on the laps on the alleged “fraudulent activities of political appointees, senior staff of ministries and parastatals and local government workers. The Governor had in a statement that “It appears the state government pays wrong people salaries,” he said. In Kaduna State alone, the State Government after its first workers’ verification exercise under the incumbent administration of Governor Nasir el-Rufai, said the state government now saves N120 million monthly hitherto be pocketed by ghost workers. It also vowed to continue the exercise “until the system is rid of fraud.” Worse still, the Kano State Government also uncovered 1,830 ghost workers out of the 2,490 casual workers engaged as street cleaners by the state Refuse Management and Sanitation Board. This development, it was said, resulted in the illegal payments of over N18million to ghost workers monthly by the state government.
Kano State Commissioner for Information, Malam Garba Mohammed, had said that the figure was presented to the State Executive Council by the committee set up to verify the actual number of the workers in the agency. “According to the committee’s report, out of the 2,490 casual workers of the board, 1,830 are ghost workers. So, based on the report, the state government is losing N18.1m monthly and this is one of the allegations that led to the setting up of the committee to investigate the issue. You will be surprised to know that for the past three years, the people had been siphoning the money every month”, he said.
The Bauchi State Governor, Alhaji Mohammed Abubakar, was recently quoted to have admitted the discovery of over 10,000 ghost workers in the state, and said that they will not escape prosecution. “I have done a lot to check activities of ghost workers in my state; that is the burning issue now in Bauchi State. From January till date, I have embarked on an exercise to clean the payroll of Bauchi State. I started with a physical verification and then I went into BVN which has done a lot for us,” I have gone this far to show that if employment spaces being fraudulently occupied today are fleshed out and given to genuine persons, the story of unemployment in this country will begin to change.
Our youths deserve the employment spaces that have long been commandeered by both retired and serving saboteurs.
There is no doubt that what is lost to ghost workers annually across the country would make maximum impact if funnelled into creative ventures.
Somebody had even opined that the over N2 billion, which was saved at the Federal level alone. It is commendable that the Treasury Single Account and the Bank Verification Number (BVN) have continue to unravel the monumental fraud rife in the civil service across the country. While I encourage both the federal, state and local government administrations to continue to evolve cutting edge technological solution to prevent the ghost worker menace, the relevant anti-corruption and security agencies must of necessity ensure that human agents responsible for the financial haemorrhage and sabotage are named, shamed and prosecuted to serve as a stopper for all such brazen acts of thievery.
LEADERSHIP
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