Governor Kinyanjui begins plan to tame wage bill

The Nakuru County government on Monday began a two-week exercise of auditing employees to weed out ghost workers.

Governor Lee Kinyanjui’s administration wants to record personal, work and biometric details of all its workers

The activity aims at taming the wage bill.

The process began at Nakuru Level Five Hospital that has about 600 employees.

Documents such as national identification card, Kenya Revenue Authority pin, letter of offer or appointment, academic and professional certificates were handed in.

Fingerprint and facial details were also collected.

COMPETENCE

Mr Lawrence Mwangangi, the Public Service Committee member, told Nation the exercise will help them account for their employees.

"We want to ensure that whoever we pay is someone who works for the county. The exercise is meant to ensure that the county manages the workforce in a better way," Mr Mwangangi said.

PricewaterhouseCoopers is carrying out the audit.

Aside from reducing the wage bill, the recommendations will help deal with competency issues.

"This exercise will help us identify many things, including whether there are incompetent and ghost workers in the payroll, where we need to cut workforce and where we need to add [more staff] so that there is a balance in service delivery," he said.

The process will inform the government of ethnic representation.

At the hospital, there were long queues as the biometric systems experienced technical hitches, which were later fixed.