By Omar Bah
The Personnel Management Office (PMO) has detected 2,142 ghost workers in the civil service, according to its preliminary findings from a staff audit at the ministries of basic and secondary education, health and agriculture.
The audit revealed that these ghost workers’ salaries were still being processed.
According to the PMO, the discovery is part of a broader effort by government to identify and eliminate ghost workers from its payroll, with previous audits uncovering over 3,000 such cases.
The initiative, it said, aims to improve payroll accuracy and recover wrongful salary payments.
In a statement shared with The Standard yesterday, the PMO said: “At the end of the said audit, over 3,000 civil servants could not be physically identified by the audit teams that visited every school and health facility as well as agricultural offices/stations around the country.”
It added that a list of unseen staff was generated and shared with the respective ministries for their reviews and comments. “For those staff in respect of whom some comments were received about their whereabouts, their status was verified and confirmed as seen. It was after all this, that a final list of unseen staff was generated and shared with the respective ministries, informing them that if no further reaction were received on behalf of their staff in question, they would have their salaries stopped for the month of September. This was what led to the stoppage of the salaries of 3024 civil servants for the month of September,” it added.
The PMO further revealed that as part of the process, those who surface after the stoppage of their salaries have to provide some proofs of their Status as active civil servants (i.e. attestation from their heads of institution, proof of attendance, maternity leave, sick leave, etc), without which their salaries would not be reinstated.
“It is not uncommon to hear civil servants say they were sick and were undergoing some traditional treatments or to find them enrolling themselves in educational institutions without adhering to due process of obtaining study leave. As an update, after two weeks of salary stoppage and as at 9 October 2024, only 882 have so far been verified and confirmed as regular civil servants out of 3,024 salaries that have been stopped; meaning there is an outstanding number of over 2,142 civil servants yet to be accounted for. The PMO will be conducting similar exercises to cover the rest of the civil service, including the Security Forces as well as the pensioners shortly.”
