Probe finds 5,000 ghost workers on government payroll
Mr Muruli Mukasa, the Minister of Public Service
What you need to know:
In 2014, the Auditor General’s office appointed an international audit firm, Ernst & Young, to investigate the validity of more than 6,000 civil servants who had been reinstated on the government payroll in April this year after they had been deleted
Kampala. The Ministry of Public Service has removed 5,586 employees from the government payroll following an audit which revealed they did not exist.
Mr Muruli Mukasa, the Minister of Public Service, told the press on Friday that the Auditor General carried out a comprehensive audit of the central and local government payroll in 2014 to validate public officers on the pay sheet using the biometric data.
“The Ministry of Public Service has removed from the payroll 5,586 public officers who have not been validated and are not in the exempted category with effect from July until they are validated,” Mr Mukasa said.
However, he added that the affected employees who believe were wrongfully deleted from the payroll be given opportunity to have their particulars verified.
He declined to give a figure of how much these “ghost workers” have been taking from the public coffers and how much government will be saving as a result.
Verification
Government currently employs 313,979 with 303,149 validated. The remaining 10,830 are yet to be verified according to the Public Service ministry. These exclude “Foreign Service Officers and other officers deployed in foreign missions, administrative attaches, and offers on study leave abroad and newly-elected political leaders.”
Mr Mukasa said the National Identification System (NSIS), among other measures, will help government continue validating public officers until all the ghost workers have been identified and eliminated.
Government made it compulsory for all public servants to have National Identity cards or risk having their names expunged from the government payroll.
Meanwhile, the Public Service ministry said it has processed July salaries for 308,393 government employees, including the validated public officers, police personnel whose validation is yet to be effected and those whose validation did not take place for some reasons.
In 2014, the Auditor General’s office appointed an international audit firm, Ernst & Young, to investigate the validity of more than 6,000 civil servants who had been reinstated on the government payroll in April this year after they had been deleted. The workers, mainly teachers and police personnel, had been declared “ghost staff” and deleted from the payroll in 2013 following a government audit. They were, however, dubiously removed without informing the Auditor General’s office and reinstated by the government technocrats on the pretext that the names had been deleted erroneously.
