Ghost workers sucking our govt dry
Mr Museveni says elimination of ghost workers from the government payroll is one way to redistribute the money to real workers.PHOTO/FILE
What you need to know:
- The issue: Ghost workers
- Our view: Government departments are not only struggling with the will to remove the ghosts in the first place, they must also find the right tools to detect and root out the ever-mutating scams from the system.
The levels of corruption and mismanagement of government resources are increasingly a point of concern as recent revelations have shown.
Over the years, the problem of ghost government employees has refused to go away. We do not seem to have effective systems of cleaning up the local government payroll or lists of pensioners to ensure that we maintain the legitimate recipients of government wages and pensions.
This has left the country bleeding billions of money from almost every ministry, department and corner of the country.
In 2018, for instance, the State House health monitoring unit found that 30 per cent of health workers registered in Abim District were “ghosts” or in this case, people who had since left their duty stations and gone abroad.
The trend has continued over the years and the monies lost to these non-existent workers has continued to grow, rather than decrease.
The channels through which the government is bleeding funds are also multiplying very fast. A salary forensic audit by the Auditor General for the year ending June 2022 found many cases of overpayments, underpayments as well as cases of illegal payroll access and deductions.
Clearly, the payroll scams are becoming more sophisticated over time. Government departments are not only struggling with the will to remove the ghosts in the first place, they must also find the right tools to detect and root out the ever-mutating scams from the system.
What is also worrying is that we seem to have learnt nothing from all the scams that have been perpetrated in the past. The “ghosts” keep reappearing in all the usual places—in teacher payrolls and pension rolls, among others.
The lack of technology has also been cited among the causes of this repeat trend of ghost appearances.
In the 2022 audit, 609 secondary school and tertiary institution employees, under the Education Service Commission (ESC), were found to have used forged minutes to access government payroll.
However, the districts pleaded that if they had had access to an automated database at the ESC containing minute extracts of all secondary school teachers, perhaps they would be in position to remove ineligible teachers from the system.
This, however, is one of very few “ghost” discoveries that came with an explanation.
For many other categories of “ghost” workers, we are left wondering how they get into the system and why they have proved so hard to remove over time.
