George Okoh in Makurdi
The Benue State Governor, Rev. Fr. Hyacinth Alia, has disclosed that verification carried out by the state government has revealed that the state’s wage bill was heavily padded by the previous government.
Alia also added that 2500 ghost workers were discovered on the payroll.
The governor, in a press release that was by his Media Aide, Mr. Tersoo Kula, expressed regrets over the delay in payment of salaries of teachers in primary and secondary schools, as well as the local government’s staff.
He said: “The decision for the delay in the payment of salaries of the above mentioned workers was taken after we discovered mindless padding of the wage bill, and other fraudulent manipulations on their payroll.”
He said that the decision became necessary after the discovery, to enable the government to sanitise and cleanse the payroll; to ascertain the true wage bill of the state and to know the genuine workers that are worth their wages.
He revealed that the first phase of an extensive staff verification and payroll audit for all teachers and local government staff has just been concluded, and it has already uncovered over 2500 ghost workers that have already been removed from the
payroll.
He identified ghost workers, ghost schools, double dipping, unlawful employment, salary padding, and payments to dead or retired individuals, unlawful replacement and inflation of the wage bill as some of the payroll infractions that were discovered from the audit.
Alia also assured that workers who were successfully screened would receive their salaries before the end of this week, noting that government is not only fishing out ghosts workers and removing the padding associated with payroll fraud, but also putting in measures to ensure that the systems are protected going forward.
