Bayelsa Uncovers Massive Irregular Employment in Civil Service

State’s IGR hits N1.8 billion

Emmanuel Addeh The Bayelsa State Government committee on civil service reforms investigating alleged payroll fraud yesterday said it had uncovered massive irregular employments at the state-owned tertiary institutions and in Sagbama Local Government Area.

According to the committee, at least 500 administrative officers at the Sagbama Local Government Area of the State had been found to be redundant, while a total of 5,000 non-academic staff were uncovered at the state-owned tertiary institutions.

The state Commissioner for Information and Orientation, Mr. Daniel Iworiso-Markson, said in a statement that the discovery only showed the large number of redundant workers drawing salaries for “doing nothing” in the state.

He explained that the fraud in the local government area and the over-bloated wage bill had made it impossible for the councils to pay salaries of local governments even when their allocations are not tampered with by the state government.

“When you have 500 administrative officers in a local government area, it means most of them are idle. It is not just imaginable; what would they be doing; what is their job?

“This figure is just for one local government area. Comprehensive efforts are being intensified to probe the payroll in the other seven local government areas”, he noted.

Meanwhile, the state announced yesterday that its monthly Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) had hit N1.8 billion , having been able to convince oil giant , Chevron, to remit taxes owed the state.

Deputy Governor of the state, Rear Admiral John Jonah (rtd), who spoke during the monthly transparency briefing to intimate the people of the state on the income and expenditure for October, disclosed that the state had yet to receive its November allocation from the federal government.

Breaking down the figures, Jonah said the state got N2.3 billion as statutory allocation for the month under review, while its 13 per cent derivation stood at N2.728 billion.

He added that Value Added Tax (VAT) it received for October was N1.1 billion , while exchange differential was N1.2 billion , with gross inflow for the month being N11.7 billion .

For the same month, the deputy governor stated that total deduction was N1.72 billion , bank loan repayments N3.3 billion , salaries for civil servants, N3.7 billion , political appointees N258 million, while total payments was N7.5 billion and money available for spending being N4.4 billion.