The Hyacinth Alia-led administration of Benue State has discovered 2,500 phantom employees on the state’s payroll.

The Governor expressed sadness about the delay in paying the salaries of teachers in elementary and secondary schools as well as local government personnel in a statement released on Thursday by his chief press secretary, Sir Tersoo Kula.

According to the governor, the administration uncovered “mindless padding of the wage bill, and other fraudulent manipulations on their payroll” before deciding to postpone the project.

According to the governor, the administration uncovered “mindless padding of the wage bill, and other fraudulent manipulations on their payroll” before deciding to postpone the project.

In order to enable the government to sanitize and purify the payroll, which, according to Governor Alia, was intended to determine the true wage bill of the state and to identify the genuine workers who are worth their salary, the decision, he claimed, became imperative following the finding.

He stated that the first stage of a thorough payroll audit and staff verification for all teachers and local government employees “just concluded, and it has already uncovered over 2500 ghost workers that have already been removed from the payroll.”

He listed some of the payroll violations found during the audit, including phantom employees, ghost schools, double dipping, illegal employment, salary padding, payments to deceased or retired people, illegal replacement, and wage bill inflation.

He remarked that the government was not only catching ghost workers and getting rid of the padding related to payroll fraud, but was also putting in place measures to ensure the systems were protected going forward. He gave the assurance that employees who were successfully screened will receive their salaries before the end of this week.