The tricks rogue civil servants use to defraud Kenyans have been revealed. They have been substituting names of dead or retired employees with those of their cronies, creating a bloated service that has been costing taxpayers Sh1.8 billion annually.
The complicated system where numbers of public servants are retained long after they ceased working in the public sector has been blamed on employees in charge of the payroll and those in the finance departments of Government institutions.
The administrators have been cashing in on loopholes in the public service structure and an outdated IT system that has not kept pace with developments in modern finance to ensure theft of public money goes undetected.
Prof Margaret Kobia (Pictured), the chairman of the Public Service Commission, which is responsible for recruiting civil servants, said that an audit ordered by the president on Thursday would identify the culprits and have them punished.
Issues blamed for the increase in the number of ghost workers include changing of names of employees who have left or died in the payroll system and failure to update payrolls after a worker dies, retires, goes on secondment or takes leave.
Procedure demands that the names of officers who have left the service for any reason be deleted immediately.
The rot in the civil service emerged when the government started transferring the public sector payroll to the counties. Governors discovered that in some instances, they had less than half the staff they were being asked to pay.
In Nairobi for example, the county government discovered that there were only about 2,000 workers in the health sector although they had been given a figure of 4,300.
President Kenyatta, on Thursday, said the government was losing up to Sh1.8 billion annually to ghost workers and ordered an immediate audit into the scandal.Prof Kobia Friday said the auditors would be outsourced and the culprits held to account.
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