The Treasury is dispatching a team of internal auditors to conduct a physical headcount of all government workers. Photo/File
What you need to know:
The purge targets those who have been irregularly employed in the public service or whose employment cannot be confirmed from recruitment data.
The Treasury is dispatching a team of internal auditors to conduct a physical headcount of all government workers.
The exercise is meant to save county governments the burden of inheriting inflated payrolls.
The Treasury is set to launch a Sh20 billion plan to rid the government payroll of ghost workers that cost the taxpayer millions of shillings in irregular salaries every month.
The purge targets those who have been irregularly employed in the public service or whose employment cannot be confirmed from recruitment data, but are on the payroll. There are also those who were employed regularly and have since left active service, but remain on the payroll.
The Teachers Service Commission (TSC) and local authorities top the list of State agencies that are known to harbour a large number of ghost workers and are targeted in the exercise.
The Sh20 billion budget will be spent over a period of three years and includes the cost of setting up a technology-based national financial management system.
The Treasury is dispatching a team of internal auditors to conduct a physical headcount of all government workers and produce a report that will be used to clean up the payroll.
Geoffrey Mwau, the economic secretary at the Treasury, says the exercise is meant to save county governments the burden of inheriting inflated payrolls that are packed with non-existent workers and channel the savings to service delivery.
The purge should also clear the ground for the Treasury to roll out an Integrated Financial Management Information System (IFMIS) that will link all ministries and county governments with the office of the Registrar of Persons for proper management of public funds.
“We plan to use IFMIS to clean up government payroll, including the local authorities, which in our view have the majority of ghost workers,” said Dr Mwau.
The head count is also targeting the government’s pension register, which is known to have thousands of ghost pensioners.
Dr Mwau, however, added a new twist to the plan with the revelation that the auditors that the Treasury is deploying to the counties will sit there permanently, setting the stage for the battle for control of county finances between the national and regional governments.
“The Treasury is initially dispatching a small number of auditors to the counties, but will later raise the number to 945 before topping it at 1,340 in 2015,” he said.
The Treasury’s quest to control county finances from Nairobi has in the past met stiff opposition from civil society groups who maintain that such an action is in breach of constitutional provisions that grant the counties independence in matters of operation.
The battle for control county finances intensified during last year’s crafting of the Public Finance Management Bill where the Treasury was accused of inserting provisions that undermined the operational autonomy of the devolved governments.
The differences caused prolonged delays in the passing of the law and the Treasury’s latest move is seen to risk to risk sparking a conflict that may delay the transition.
The latest payroll audit signals that the government has finally come to grips with a problem that has emerged in successive audits of its finances. PricewaterhouseCoopers’ audit of the City Council of Nairobi’s finances three years ago unearthed a large number of ghost workers at City Hall, but no concrete action has since been taken to deal with it.
“Besides the ghosts, many have over-employed causing huge strains on their resources,” said Wanjiru Gikonyo, the director of The Institute of Social Accountability that has recently audited devolved funds.
Ms Gikonyo reckons that most local authority employees lack skills to do their work because many have been employed on the basis of patronage.
Though critics see the Treasury’s latest move as an attempt to gain control over the operations of devolved governments, Dr Mwau insists that the reforms are aimed at synchronising civil service payroll at the National and County governments to minimise leakage of funds.
“We are very keen on fiscal responsibility matters and are also advising that those who are in taking fiscal responsibility in the counties must be holders of CPA qualifications or equivalent,” Dr Mwau said.
The Treasury’s blueprint says that there will be “annual payroll audits to identify and control weaknesses or ghost workers.” It demands that the TSC must finalise the cleansing of its payroll by 2015 and reconcile the records with payroll data.
The Treasury wants the 287,000 teachers to be registered and their county files linked to the TSC headquarters in Nairobi. The payroll audit alone is expected to cost Sh235 million while pension audit will take another Sh200 million.
Though the blueprint does not directly talk of the staff reduction at the county level, it leaves open that possibility in its provisioning for staff “rationalisation” and “redeployment” in a separate report.
The report by the Transitional Authority indicates that there will an audit of human resources but there is no indication of immediate staff retrenchment.
The authority has in the past warned that all local authority staff will be redeployed in the county governments but once devolution takes shape in three years, those who will not have acquired the requisite skills will be retrenched.
The authority says it will facilitate and co-ordinate the audit of human resource capacity of both the National and County governments to establish the number, the cadres, gender, age, and qualifications of staff.
It will then analyse the reports, identify gaps and recommend measures to fill in the gaps.
Pension audit is expected to start with the procurement of a consultant and verification of data to be cleansed. In 2014, the first 135,000 pension payroll files will be cleaned followed by a similar number in 2015.
