By David Dimas
Governor Jibrilla Bindow of Adamawa State
Payroll fraud (the placement of non-existing, underage, retired or deceased staff’s names on the payroll especially of government concerns) which many Nigerians have come to know as “Ghost workers” is a deep-rooted problem for most governments, especially in Nigeria.
It will not be far from the truth to say that this ‘cancerous’ evil against the State is almost becoming the news-maker across most African countries these days. It is mostly caused by the absence of audit and accountability which allows corrupt payroll staff to manipulate government expenditures through ways they feel can never be exposed.
In a brave attempt to combat this predicament in Adamawa State, the Executive Governor, Senator Muhammadu Jibrilla Bindow, post-election, constituted a Payroll Verification Committee headed by Chief Maurice Vunobolki: an accomplished accountant and financial expert.
As part of its terms of reference, the committee was empowered to verify “the State Local Governments’ workforce (existing payroll structure) with a view to creating a database for effective implementation of e-payment salary system”.
Having followed this issue assiduously and relentlessly, I am aware that the task-force worked laboriously and uncovered 12,609 ghost workers from the 51,369 staff on the on the payroll of all the local government councils in the State.
According to the report, the committee had cleared 38,760 members of staff and rolled them over to the e-payment database. The rest were cases ranging from “failure to show up for the screening exercise”, “underage employment”, “Payment Voucher” (PV) and “Pay Record Card (PRC) alteration”, “employments that violated executive approvals and irregular employments.”
The success of the audit is also expected to practically rake in a whooping N548.5m to the State’s treasury as Personal Income Tax annually.
In the end, the verification exercise was reported to have exposed a gross monthly financial implication …Read More
Source:: PM Newspaper
