This archive report was first published on 27 November 2019.
It has been five years since the government launched an investigation into the ghost worker scandal, which led to the removal of over 12,500 individuals from the payroll list in 2014. However, in a shocking revelation, Treasury CS Ukur Yatani has announced that ghost workers have returned to the national payroll.
According to Yatani, weak payroll systems at both county and national government levels have made it easier to manipulate the payroll and include ghost State employees. He stated that there is a problem with weak payroll management systems, with a number of payrolls still populated with ghost workers earning money from the Exchequer.
Yatani made the remarks yesterday at a press conference in Nairobi, where he also revealed that the government is losing millions of shillings due to salaries of ghost workers. He attributed the issue to the lack of effective payroll management systems, which have made it easy for individuals to manipulate the payroll and earn money without doing any work.
It is worth noting that the government had conducted a biometric exercise in 2014 to determine the official number of employees included in the government's payroll list. The exercise was conducted after an audit report revealed that the government was spending Sh1.8 billion annually in salary payments to ghost workers.
At the time, Uhuru Kenyatta presided over a cabinet meeting with officials of the Anti-Banking Fraud Unit, DCI, and EACC to launch an investigation into the ghost worker scandal. Anne Waiguru, who was the Devolution Cabinet Secretary at the time, announced that over 12,500 individuals who did not show up for the biometrics exercise were expunged from the government's payroll list.
However, it appears that the issue of ghost workers has not been fully addressed, with Yatani's revelation that they have returned to the payroll. The government has since frozen new hiring, but it remains to be seen whether this will be effective in addressing the issue.
