28th July, 2010
No fewer than 252 ghost workers in the employment of Ekiti West Local Government Area of Ekiti State, have been discovered, the chairman, Olugbenga Ogunleye, has disclosed.
Making the disclosure in Aramoko, the council headquarters of the local government last weekend.
Ogunleye, who lamented that the council had been plunged into serious debt by the fraudulent persons disguising as workers in the council, said it was unbelievable that some of the fake workers even sat a recent promotion examination.
“We were recording a deficit of N3 million since January but by May, we were able to detect that the deficit was coming from salaries paid to those ghost workers who were not included in the budget.
“The verification exercise which revealed the ghost workers has saved us from total indebtedness as we had already incurred N12 million debt before the detection.â€
He explained that some of the ghost workers got their employment letters by making photo copies of original letters issued to genuine workers and altered the names and years of employment, adding that to give the impression that they are not new in service, some of them back-dated their letters to 2006.
He said an in-house verification exercise revealed the 252 ghost workers.