23, 306 civil servants, banks indicted in alleged salary scam

By Ali Smart

The probe panel investigating alleged salary scam within the federal civil service has uncovered a total of 23, 306 civil servants and some banks’ officials who may be part of the syndicate, Ripples has learnt.

Following this discovery, government is said to have embarked on a process of investigating and removing the indicted civil servants from its payroll.

Ripples was reliably informed that out of 312,306 civil servants whose bank accounts have so far been checked through the Bank Verification Number platform, 23,306 individuals have issues with their accounts.

A source, who would not be named, said the adoption of the BVN for salary payment helped the Federal Ministry of Finance to check the details of about 312,000 civil servants.

The source said, “Out of the accounts of about 312,000 civil servants processed so far, the ministry was said to have uncovered irregularities in the account of about 23,306. They are suspected to have been collecting double salary.

“These indicted individuals are in two categories. In the first group, we found out that the names of some civil servants whose salaries are being processed are different from the names on the accounts where their salaries are paid. What this means is either those in this category are drawing salary from two sources (which could be different parastatals), or they are ghost workers.”

He said the probe also showed that salary were being paid to some inactive accounts, thus raising the suspicion that government was merely making payment to ghost workers.

For instance, the probe team was said to have discovered that some of these inactive accounts were domiciled in a particular branch of a bank.

According to the source, the committee investigating the matter discovered that in a particular branch of a bank, over 300 accounts of some civil servants were opened on the same day and all of them have become dormant.

The source said by the time the ongoing investigation is concluded, Nigerians will be shocked by the sheer number of top and other categories of civil servants who may be forced to resign as a result of their complicity in the salary scam.

When contacted, the Special Adviser to the Minister of Finance on Media Matters, Mr. Festus Akanbi, declined to comment on the report of the exercise, which he described as ongoing, saying the public will be appropriately briefed when the full report is ready.

The adoption of the BVN became inevitable due to the failure of the Integrated Payroll Personnel Information System (IPPIS) to effectively deal with the issue of ghost workers in the federal civil service.

The Bank Verification Number is a number that uniquely identifies each bank’s customer for “Know Your Customer” (KYC) purposes.

According to the ministry, the strategy of using BVN rather than requiring the physical presence of each member of staff has significantly simplified and accelerated the progress of the project and at a lower cost than previously incurred.

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