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.
In a statement signed by the Commissioner for Information and Public Enlightenment, Kolapo Alimi, the government said verification of the audit report 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 during a Channels Television programme on Thursday that the Adeleke administration refused to implement the staff verification report after it exposed fraud on the state’s payroll.
Alimi responded that the consultant was hired to clean up the payroll inherited from the previous administration 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,” Alimi said.
He explained that a review committee, 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 unreachable. Out of 6,713 retirees declared as ghost pensioners, the committee confirmed 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),” Alimi stated.
The commissioner said following the discrepancies discovered, the government implemented a homegrown payroll reform and welcomed the involvement of anti-corruption agencies.
Efforts to reach Bakrin-Ottun for reaction were unsuccessful as calls to her mobile line did not go through and she had not responded to WhatsApp messages.
