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| PSC chairperson Margaret Kobia. |
The tricks rogue civil servants use to defraud Kenyans can be revealed today.
They
have been substituting names of dead or retired employees with those of
their cronies, creating a bloated service that has been costing tax
payers 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on loopholes in the public service structure and an outdated IT system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.
Identify the culprits
Prof
Margaret Kobia, the chairman of the Public Service Commission, which is
responsible for recruiting civil servants, said that an audit ordered
by President Kenyatta 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
full scale of 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 Uhuru 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.
Devolution
Cabinet Secretary Ann Waiguru last year said the large number of ghost
workers in the country could be one of the reasons doctors, especially
those on the payroll illegally went on strike to resist being deployed
to the counties.
“We sampled eight ministries and we
found out that more than 15 per cent of workers there were
non-existent,” she told journalists during the strike by medics in the
health sector.
Kisii governor James Ongwae said
yesterday that he oversaw the reduction of civil service employees by
84,000 during his tenure as the Director of Personnel Management.
But he said he could not explain how deep the issue of ghost workers is in the civil service since he left in 2002.
“Since
I left, five permanent secretaries have been in treasury, I do not know
the structures that were put in place thereafter, but I did my part
during my tenure,” he said.
Prof Kobia said they were
working on finding out who was responsible for the problem and identify
the categories of ghost workers.
Meanwhile local and
international audit firms operating in Kenya are eyeing the government
contract to clean up the public service . Among the top candidates for
the job are PWC Kenya, Deloitte & Touche, Ernst & Young, KPMG
Kenya, Alexander Forbes and PKF Kenya among others.
“We
have a very big focus on working with the government in Kenya and right
across Africa. In Kenya particularly, we are looking for opportunities
in the counties and the national government where we can improve
governance by establishing proper systems and sweeping out duplication
and wastage of resources,” Mr Suresh Kana, Africa Senior Partner, PWC,
said during the launch of PWC Office Kenya, which was presided over by
President Kenyatta on Thursday.
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