Niger State has discovered monthly payment of over N672m salaries to ghost workers in the Civil Service.

Chairman of the Salary Management Committee, Engineer Ibrahim Panti, disclosed other millions were recovered to have been going into some fictitious spending in Ministries, Agencies and Departments(MDAs) across the state.

Panti, who is also the Commissioner for Works and Infrastructural Development, disclosed this to newsmen in Minna while explaining the reason behind the delay in payment of June salary in the state.

He said the government had conducted another screening exercise to further verify the staff on its payroll because payment of salaries has almost outweighed the Federal allocation received by the state.

The Commissioner explained a chunk of the Federal allocation to the state goes to the payment of civil servants’ salaries saying:

“In May 2019, I had an opportunity to see that Niger Government received federal allocation of little above N3 billion, meanwhile, the civil servants took N2.7 billion only while about N50 million goes to the appointees and politicians.”

Panti noted that over 30 per cent of the workers called to appear for screening did not turn up while some others who turned were discovered to have fake certificates or retired.

“For example, out of 1,000 invited for screening, only 600 to 700 came for the actual screening; out of 1,451 persons screened 461 is on hold, 21 of them were retirees and rejected while 259 did not appear for the exercise.

“About 36,000 names of civil servants was presented to the committee when we started the screening we brought it down to 27,000 and again to 25,000,” he stressed.

He said the committee discovered different names of people using different banks with the same BVN being paid salaries.

He declared that those who had been involved in this salary rackets would be made to face the wrath of the law according to the civil service rules and regulations.

Panti stated despite the threats in high quarters being received by the committee, it would stop at nothing but you bring the culprits to book.