A committee constituted to audit staff in all the local government areas in Adamawa state has uncovered about 12,609 ghost workers in the payroll of the LGs.
The chairman of the 13-man committee, Maurice Vunoboki, said it was also discovered that 1,405 appointments violated executive approvals, while 2,731 irregular employments did not conform to the Teachers Salary Scale (TSS).
“A total of 38,760 in the workforce was cleared and migrated to the e-payment database against 51,369 earlier presented to my committee,” Mr. Vunoboki said. “519 did not turn up for the verification exercise, while 1,780 were under-aged employees, while the balance of 563 were retired by age or years of service”
Vunobolki said the gross salaries of local government councils, Local Education Authority and Primary Health Care Development Agency were N1.71 billion as at July 2015, with the gross figure after validation at N1.37 billion as at May 2016.
This has resulted in gross monthly bill of N3416 million and N4.1 billion annually, he said.
In a related development, the state governor, Mohammadu Bindow, while receiving the report on Local government staff verification on Thursday, promised to make payment of local government workers salaries a first line charge item.
The committee was set up in July 2015 to verify the state local governments’ workforce with a view to creating a database for effective implementation of e-payment salary system.
Bindow said the first line charge would give priority to prompt payment of salaries to official council workers, adding that their salaries would henceforth be paid at the same time with the state government workers.
He appealed to the local government workers to remain patient as their four months outstanding salaries would be paid before the end of this month.
The governor vowed to prosecute any government official found to have been involved in any financial misconduct in the local government administration.
He directed the Ministry of Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs to furnish his office with details and updates on local government/state joint account.
