Posted by The government of Benue State, led by Governor Hyacinth Alia, has found that the state pays 2,500 people who don’t exist.
In a statement released on Thursday by his Chief Press Secretary, Sir Tersoo Kula, the Governor said he was sorry that teachers in primary and secondary schools and people who work for the local government had not been paid on time.
The Governor said that the wait was decided because “mindless padding of the wage bill and other fraudulent manipulations on their payroll” were found.
Governor Alia said that the discovery made the choice necessary so that the government could clean up and sanitize the payroll. This, he said, was to figure out the true wage bill of the state and find the real workers who deserve their pay.
He said that the first part of a big staff verification and payroll check for all teachers and local government workers had just ended, and that it had already found and fired more than 2500 “ghost workers.”
During the audit, he found payroll violations like “ghost workers,” “ghost schools,” “double dipping,” “illegal employment,” “salary padding,” “payment to dead or retired people,” “illegal replacement,” and “inflation of the wage bill.”
He promised that workers who passed the screening process would get paid by the end of this week. He also said that the government was not only looking for “ghost workers” and getting rid of padding caused by payroll fraud, but also taking steps to protect the systems in the future.