Millions paid out to ghost workers

Bungoma county Assembly. [File, Standard]

The county has been losing up to Sh6 million per year to ghost workers in the agriculture department.

Deputy Governor Charles Ngome yesterday said an audit had revealed that there were 12 ghost workers on the department's payroll.

Speaking during the launch of a task force report dubbed Agriculture Fisheries Livestock Irrigation and Cooperatives (AFLICK) Human Resource Audit, Prof Ngome said the audit of county staff would continue in various departments to help plug leaks in the ballooning wage bill.

"We have discovered that we are losing Sh6 million to ghost workers in the agriculture department. We will get to the bottom of this and ensure that we trim our wage bill," he said.

The deputy governor said his office could also be having ghost workers.

Insider job

"Action is needed against officers who do this. There is no way ghost workers can be in the system without help from someone on the inside. Someone must be held responsible," he said.

Ngome said the audit revealed that the county needed to start fresh staff recruitment soon; since a majority of the staff were approaching retirement age.

The task force chairman, Barasa Nyukuri, said the audit was conducted across all the nine sub-counties. A total of 426 staff were interviewed.

Mr Barasa, who is also a governance consultant, said the county administration needed to have in place proper measures to recover money lost through payment of salaries to ghost workers.

"We need to take proper action so that this issue of ghost workers comes to a stop even if it means recovering money that was paid to those not in the system," he said.

Barasa said many employees in the department were demoralised because of poor working conditions.