FG Uncovers 11,000 Ghost Workers, as Buhari Orders Routine Audit of MDAs
After eliminated 23,000 ghost
workers from the Federal Payroll and saved N2.29 Billion, the Federal
Government on Wednesday said it has discovered another 11,000 ghost workers
even as President Muhammadu Buhari issued an executive fiat for a routine audit
of all ministries, agencies and parastatals.
This was disclosed by the
Minister of Finance, Mrs Kemi Adeosun while briefing journalists after the
Federal Executive Council’s meeting held at the Presidential Villa. She said the audit was aimed at
eliminating waste from the system.
According to her, “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,” .
She said the World Bank had
indicated its readiness to support the country in this initiative again, but
said it would about take six months to get the required legislation through.
The minister explained that, “in
the interim we have agreed to do the presidential initiative on continuous
audits which will give backing to the work that we are currently doing and will
allow us to extend this work beyond payroll to other areas of expenditure.
“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,” she added.
Adeosun said FEC discussed
extensively the role of existing internal audit offices and concluded that,
“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.’
She said the auditing process would be computerized
and required special
audit techniques, computer assistants to do the techniques and special techniques
which some of these auditors did 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.
“On the issue of the ghost
workers, of the 23,000 that we have removed our payroll has 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.”
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