Okonjo-Iweala sends “ghost workers” to ICPC for investigation

The Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, on Wednesday said she is now ready to send the list of “ghost workers” to the Independent Corrupt Practices and other Related Offences Commission, ICPC for investigation.

Tax, Federal Government, Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria economy

Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala said this in a statement by her spokesperson on Wednesday.

The Ministry has recently been inundated with allegations that thousands of names that showed up on the payrolls of many ministries, departments and agencies, MDAs as ghost workers were being deliberately shielded from prosecution and sanctions.

On Friday last week in Abuja, the Lead Director, Centre for Social Justice, CSJ, Eze Onyekwere, openly accused Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala of refusing to release the names of the officials in charge of MDAs with “ghost workers” on their payrolls for prosecution.

Mr. Onyekwere had cited the case of the Budget Office of the Federation, BOF, where he said about 1000 workers were said to have been on its payroll prior to verification, only for the figure to be reduced to 251 after the exercise.

“If 749 ghost workers were found in one office, and there were the head of Personnel who confirmed the staff list; Head of Accounts/Payroll, who prepared the vouchers and a Permanent Secretary, who signed off the vouchers before the monies were released, yet nobody has been prosecuted, then government is not sincere about the fight against ghost workers,” Mr. Onyekwere said.

The civil society activist, who also accused the Ministry of Finance of rebuffing repeated requests by the group for the release of the list of statutory transfers in the budget, said his court application for an order compelling the Minister to comply was granted recently.

But, the spokesperson to the Minister, Paul Nwabuikwu, denied that the Ministry ever rejected any request for information from civil society groups on release of appropriations and statutory transfers.

Mr. Nwabuikwu said such allegation was not in tandem with the ministry’s consistent implementation of a policy of transparency and accountability in the management of the economy and public finances.

This policy, he said, has always been demonstrated in the monthly publication of allocations to the three tiers of government, regular updates on the status of funding of subsidy reinvestment and empowerment programme, SURE-P, payments to oil marketers for verified imports of petroleum products as well as other information.

He said the Ministry had no basis for rejecting any legitimate requests from civil society groups for information on allocations to any government ministry or agency.

Consequently, in obedience to the recent court judgment, he said the ministry, through the Budget Office of the Federation, was collating the details of appropriations and statutory transfers to the National Assembly, the Independent National Electoral Commission, National Judicial Council, the Niger Delta Development Commission, Universal Basic Education and National Human Rights Commission for publication.

“These agencies are all on first-line charge to the Federation Account and therefore the ministry must work with them to obtain the necessary information,” the spokesperson said.

Reviewing the progress made so far by government in the implementation of integrated personnel and payroll system, IPPIS, Mr, Nwabuikwu said about 45,000 names of ghost workers have so far been taken off the payroll, with about N118 billion saved.

To ensure that identified culprits could face the full wrath of the law, he said the Ministry of Finance has referred the matter to the ICPC for further investigation.

Dismissing the allegation that the Budget Office of the Federation and other agencies have the highest proportion of ghost workers in the country, Mr. Nwabuikwu said the Office, which was one of the pioneer agencies on the IPPIS platform since 2006, had eliminated ghost workers from its payroll for about seven years now.

He assured that the Ministry of Finance would, in line with its statutory mandate and international best practice, continue to manage the finances of the country transparently. (0)

Okonjo-Iweala sends “ghost workers” to ICPC for investigation