By Solomon Ezekiel
[T]he Federal Government has announced plans to rid the civil service of about 11000 workers who are suspected to be ghosts.
Briefing State House correspondents after Wednesday’s Federal Executive Council meeting, Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun said the issue of solving the ghost worker syndrome is an ongoing process which the government is determined to complete.
The Federal Government had recently announced the sack of about 23000 ghost workers from the civil service.
“On the issue of the ghost workers, the 23,000 that we have removed from our payroll has reduced government bill by N2.29billion per month. The update on that is that we are now investigating another potential 11,000. Again we are using computer techniques to identify those who we need to investigate, so we are now looking at the second batch and as we resolve those cases we would inform you of the amount saved and the number of people removed,” the minister said.
She continued: “In the budget speech, the President said that we would introduce a continuous audit process, particularly of payroll and already that work has resulted in the elimination of about 23,000 fraudulent recipients of federal salary and more work is still ongoing.
We felt that the continuous audit work should not just be limited to payroll, there is actually need to strengthen internal audit across government and to that extent, the world bank had in 2010 started an initiative to try and introduce real-space internal audit in Nigeria, but it wasn’t successful.
The world bank has indicated its readiness to support us in this initiative again, but it recognised that it would about take six months to get the required legislation true. So as an interim we have agreed to do the Presidential initiative on continuous audits which will give backings to the work that we are currently doing and will allow us to extend this work beyond payroll to other areas of expenditure.”
According to the minister, ” the FEC deliberated extensively about the need for this and agreed that the control framework over finance and spending of government’s money needed to be strengthened especially in anticipation of the approval of the budget, which is an extended budget. If we don’t strengthen our controls then there is a risk that that money would leak or that be applied to the wrong things and therefore, the ability to go into various agencies without notice and check and do audits and updates to make sure that public money is being spent in accordance
with our expectations and objectives.”
“FEC approved the setting up of this initiative effectively using an executive order to create internal audit to enable us continue this work and to extend it to everywhere that federal money is being spent or received so that we can have better oversight.
there was a discussion on the role of existing internal audit offices, the problem they have is that they actually report to the people that they are supposed to be checking on and so they are actually not able to be as effective as we would like. And also most of what we do now is computerised and we need special audit techniques, computer assistants to do the techniques and special techniques which some of these auditors do not have.
We are not going to be recruiting any additional people, we are going to be using existing staff, qualified accountants within the office of the accountant general within the federal civil service and redeploy them to create this function which we believe will strengthen the controls of our public money,” she said.
