As the Office of the Auditor General finalizes a two – year process of updating the government payroll, a total of 5586 government workers have been found to be ghosts.
The clean up exercise of Government Ministries, Departments and Agencies’ payroll according to Public Service Minister Hon Muruuli Musaka started in 2014.
The audit exercise involved validating public officers using the biometric data from the National ID database.
Minister Mukasa told reporters at Media center on Friday, that nearly 2% of all the government employees (which translates to 10,830 of them) were not validated.
This group he said is still being examined further and that those who will be confirmed to be ghosts will be publicized and prosecuted.
“Arising out of the exercise, 98.1% of the public officers on government pay roll as of August 2014 were validated,” said the Minister.
Further examination of the 10,830 is still ongoing according to the minister, to remove valid government officers who could have been serving on foreign missions and missed out on the initial validation, administrative attaches, officers on study leave, as well as the newly elected political leaders.
So far, as of July 2016 according to the minister, a total of 5,586 public officers have been confirmed to be ghosts and have been removed from the government payroll.
These names are set to be published in newspapers, the minister adds. The fraudulent cases by next month will be forwarded to the Police and the Inspectorate of Government for further investigation.
Muruuli Mukasa revealed however, that the validation exercise will carry on at the Ministry offices in Kampala.