From Adamu Shehu, Bauchi
Bauchi State Governor Bala Abdulkadir Mohammed has assured the people of the his readiness to deal with fraudulent activities discovered in the process to have a genuine nominal roll in the Civil Service System.
He made statement on the occasion of Public Media Parley with Stakeholders on Challenges of State Salary Payment and Issues of Nominal/Payrolls held on Thursday at the Command Guest House, Bauchi.
Governor Bala Mohammed says the meeting became necessary in order to proffer solutions to the lingering challenges of Salary, Pension, Allowances of Civil Servant in the State.
The governor explained that, he was very sad that by act of Commission, collusion and distortion, the state is facing a monumental task of sorting out what is clearly a corrupted salary regime.
“I have kept my promise by ensuring that workers are paid as at when due. In fact, we pay salaries on or before the 26 of every month. But we are still not there yet, the reason is simple and painful, unfortunately, the civil service in Bauchi state has suffered from systematic attrition bastardized by fraudulent practices and outright corruption,” he said.
Bala continued that, “my predecessors who attempted to sanitize the system, either lack of the courage, political will or they were frustrated by cartel or beneficiaries of this organized financial criminality.”
However, he says it appears to be at issue of aligning nominal and payrolls and sorting out the arithmetic, suddenly turn to be a problem that seems to defy all known formulate that will bring a solution, clearly the problem was much more challenging than i earlier envisaged.
Bala Mohammed informed that, “in the year 2015, the salary bill for Bauchi State combined was less than 4.5 Billion Naira. As i address you, we are near the 7 Billion Naira mark. We have not employed. Even though, some civil servants have retired or passed on, we continue to experience exponential rise in our salary bill.
“What we have done in Government is to employ global best practice. Technology Data Key. we also need credible experts to drive both in order to succeed. Consequently, we engaged the services of a Financial Management Consultant DYNATECH who will be giving us a head start at finding solutions. The initial findings are mind boggling.”
The maintained that, for example, Payroll Fraud Account for more than 35% of Accounting Fraud and employee theft in the State. Lack of adequate payroll fraud mechanism that will check the activities of the fraudsters lead to the unchecked activities over these period.
Ghost workers, civil servants falsifying allowances and other fraud in payrolls have frozen employment thereby creating a huge vacuum in the service delivery as well as generation gap in the State Service.
The state Head of Civil Service, Alh. Ahmed Abubakar Ma’aji solicited the cooperation of Bauchi workers which is very important in the process so as not to allow the innocent people to fall victims of circumstance.
An IT Consulatant DYNATECH Solutions on their contribution they made series of revelations during the occasion has revealed that a lot of anomalies and corrupt practices going on in the state civil service administration and they debunked all allegations that they brought confusion in the state salary and pensions.
Other stakeholders during the gathering contributed on the way forward to have sanity in the state salary system, especially in the local government administration and other Ministries Departments and Agencies in the state.
