Akure — CONTRARY to earlier reports, 10,000 ghost workers instead of 6,000, were uncovered by Ondo State government in the 18 local government councils of the state.
Already, chairmen of councils where unauthorised recruitment of unqualified workers or non-existing individuals’ names were used to defraud the local councils are being investigated.
According to the outcome of a staff audit committee set up by Governor Olusegun Mimiko, over 6,000 of them were junior staff, while 4,000 were in the senior cadre.
It will be recalled that the House of Assembly recently suspended some council chairmen in the state for failure to carry out staff audit.
This, according to investigation, spurred the state government to set up the staff audit which later discovered the fraud.
The staff audit also discovered “unauthorised recruitment of unqualified workers or non-existing individuals whose names were being used to deduct salaries from the local government accounts on monthly basis.”
It was discovered in the course of the audit committee’s investigation that the difference in nominal roles of the local councils between December 2008 and December 2012 was over 10,000 staff claimed to have been employed.
Secretary to the State Government, Dr. Rotimi Adelola, said the fraud, which caused government between N400 and N500 million naira monthly to augment salaries in the third tier, was worrisome.
He said: “The names given as workers recruited at the time of the illegal recruitment are fictitious being used by the council operators to defraud the state.
“And the few names that could be traced are those of school pupils and family friends who collect salaries for rendering no service.”
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