The Osun State Government has dismissed allegations of a N13 billion payroll scam levelled against it by Sally Tibbot Limited, accusing the auditing firm of declaring 15,000 government staff and retirees as “ghost workers” to claim a N2 billion commission.
The government, in a statement signed by the Commissioner for Information and Public Enlightenment, Kolapo Alimi, obtained in Osogbo on Friday, also said verification of the audit report submitted by the consultant confirmed that more than “two third of those declared ghost workers are bonafide staff with full identification and documentation.”
The Chief Executive Officer of Sally Tibbot, Sa’adat Bakrin-Ottun, whose firm was contracted by the state government, had alleged while featuring on a programme aired on Channels Television on Thursday that the Adeleke administration refused to implement the report of the staff verification after the exercise had exposed fraud on the state’s payroll.
Alimi, while reacting to some of the issues raised by Bakrin-Ottun in the said interview, further said the consultant was hired to clean up the payroll the current administration inherited from its predecessor but ended up labelling many active workers as “ghost staff.”
“We inform the public that the governor will be happy if 15,000 ghost workers can truly be fished out. This was the reason why the Governor initially insisted against all odds that the audit report must be fully implemented before credible loopholes were discovered in the report.
“As of now, the Governor will be more than elated if the EFCC and the ICPC can help to identify the ghost workers. So the call by Sally Tibbot for the involvement of the anti-corruption agencies is most warmly welcome. The governor has nothing to hide especially as the payroll audit in question was between 2018 to November 2023,” Alimi said.
Absolving the elder brother of the governor, Deji Adeleke, of any blame in the crisis, Alimi further said, “the involvement of Dr deji was a result of information he received that bonafide civil servants were being declared as ghost workers and he wanted to ensure that no bonafide civil servants were unjustly laid off or dismissed.
“As he promised in 2022 to be a watchdog for good governance, Dr Deji intimated the governor of emerging negative reports and the governor in a bid to validate the audit report brought the consultant to Dr Deji’s residence to prove the validity of her report.”
Giving reasons why the audit report was eventually jettisoned, the commissioner noted that efforts to validate the report reached a crossroads when the technical team of the consultant confirmed that the payroll system about to be implemented in replacement for Chams software had never been tested anywhere, a situation that raised alarm bells for the governor and other functionaries.
He further explained that the review committee, which was agreed to by the auditing firm, later discovered that out of 8,448 workers declared as unseen by Sally Tibbot, 8,015 were confirmed as active workers, while 433 were found to be unreachable.
The commissioner also said that out of the total 6,713 retirees declared as ghost pensioners, the review committee was able to confirm 5,830, while 883 could not be reached.
“Sally Tibbot which had already inflated total alleged ghost workers to 15,000 to claim a payment of about Two Billion Naira was in desperation as the percentage claim to the firm has drastically reduced as total unreachable number of workers was less than 1000, which eventually reduced the consultant payment to about forty seven million naira (₦47, 000,000).
“The public is invited to note that several invitations extended to the firm to visit and reconfirm the list of credible staff she declared as ghost workers was ignored as she held unto the faulted figures of 15,000 as ghost workers in the state,” Alimi said.
He said that following the discrepancies discovered in the staff audit report, the government had implemented a homegrown payroll reform and restated its readiness for intervention in the matter by anti-corruption agencies.
The PUNCH reports that the Osun State Government and Sally Tibbot have been at loggerheads over the non-implementation of the report of a staff audit carried out for the government.
Efforts to reach Sa’adat Bakrin-Ottun, the CEO of Sally Tibbot for reaction to the alleged padding of the verification report to get N2bn commission from the government failed.
While calls to her mobile line did not go through, she has not responded to the WhatsApp message sent to her, through the mobile line our correspondent had been previously interacting with her as of the time of filing this report.
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