Migori conducts headcount to weed out ghost workers

Headcount of Migori County government workers kicked off on Tuesday with the Governor Okoth Obado leading the way in presenting his papers and other testimonials.

The employees converged at the Migori stadium where officials from the human resource, monitoring  and  evaluation team conducted  the  count.

The week-long event is aimed at weeding out ghost workers who are on the  payroll.

All the 2,700 employees in eight sub-counties must participate  in the exercise.

GHOST WORKERS

County director in charge of monitoring and evaluation Joshua Ongwara said the exercise started well.

“We are  doing the head count on a departmental basis and staggered  for days to avert  congestions at the venue. We started  with the governor’s  office  staff before  moving  to other departments,” said Dr Ongwara.

Governor Obado said the exercise is necessary to clean up the payroll.

“In order to streamline our payroll, it is important to occasionally conduct a headcount that involves verification of the existence of employees at each work station and validation of their existence in the government payroll. This will also save the county government millions of shillings that are paid to ghost workers,” he said.

STREAMLINEPAYROLL

“In 2016, all the county government workers participated in headcount that helped us weed out ghost works. It worked well. We caught the ghost staff and managed to streamline our payroll.”

“Therefore, I have ordered for a detailed employee headcount for all categories of staff; permanent and pensionable, fixed duration contracts and casual workers,” he said.

Governor Obado said: “This will enable us as a government to establish exact number of employees in our payroll and to know their monthly wage bills, establish whether all the names in the payroll are genuine county employees and that they are physically present on the ground.”

In 2016,  the exercise  revealed 46  ghost workers  who were irregularly earning  money from the  county administration.

The fake workers, according  to the county administration,  were taking home Sh2.7 million every month.

UNREPORTED DEATHS

The  victims  were said to have  taken advantage of those who left service without notification, unreported deaths, unexplained desertions of duty and transfers done before devolution or after counties came into existence.

Some  of them used forged appointment letters  to gain entry into the payroll.

Since he assumed  office, Mr Obado  has hired 1,100 staff.

He inherited 1,600 in the previous payrolls of the defunct local authorities.