By: Lamin B. Darboe, Information Officer, MoPS
As part of the Personnel Management Office (PMO) ‘s routine exercise, a staff audit was recently conducted to clean up the Government payroll of ghost workers within the system.
This was contained in a press statement released last week from the office of the Permanent Secretary, Personnel Management Office (PMO), Banjul.
The incidence of “ghost workers” according to the press release has been a perennial problem in the civil service and it normally occurs when civil servants unceremoniously leave their jobs.
It added that, regarding the current situation, the staff audit exercise covered three key Ministries: the Ministries of Basic and Secondary Education, Health, and Agriculture.
The exercise revealed that, at the end of the exercise, over 3, 000 civil servants were not physically identified by the audit teams that visited their (civil servants) posting institutions around the country.
“A list of unseen staff was generated and shared with their respective institutions for their (institution’s) views and comments. For those staff in respect of which some comments were received about their whereabouts, their status was verified and confirmed as seen,” the statement explained.
After the exercise, a final list of unseen was generated and shared with the respective institutions, informing them that if no further reactions were received on behalf of their staff in question, their salaries would be stopped for the month of September 2024. This was what led to the stoppage of the salaries of over 3, 000 civil servants for the month mentioned above.
As part of the process the release added, those who surface after the stoppage of their salaries were provided with proof of their salaries status as active civil servants (i.e. attestation from heads of their institution, proof of attendance register, maternity, sick and study leave letters, etc.), without which their salaries wouldn’t be reinstated.
According to the release, it is not common to hear civil servants say they are sick and were undergoing some traditional treatments or to find them enrolled themselves in educational institutions without adhering to due process of obtaining sick leave or study leave with salary before the commencement of such treatments of programs.
As an update, after two weeks of salary stoppage, and as of October 10, 2024, the statement stated, that only 882 have been verified and confirmed as regular civil servants out of 3,024 salaries that have been stopped; meaning there is an outstanding number of over 2,142 civil servants yet to be accounted for.
In a similar but separate development, the PMO intends to conduct a similar exercise to cover the rest of the Civil Service as well as the pensioners shortly.
