Osun denies N13.7bn ghost worker payroll allegation, discredits audit firm report
The Osun State Government has pushed back against allegations made by forensic audit firm Sally Tibbot Consulting Limited, which accused the state of padding its payroll with thousands of ghost workers, branding the claims as untrue and damaging.
At a press briefing in Lagos on Friday, the consulting firm alleged that its forensic audit and payroll verification exercise uncovered 8,452 fictitious workers, who were reportedly paid more than ₦13.7 billion annually by the Osun State Government.
Responding to the accusation in a statement released in Osogbo on Saturday, the Commissioner for Information and Public Enlightenment, Kolapo Alimi, rejected the claims, insisting that the firm had wrongly classified genuine employees as ghost workers.
Alimi explained that the government’s response was prompted by reports that the consultant allegedly listed the state governor, Ademola Adeleke; his deputy, Kola Adewusi; the Secretary to the State Government; the Vice Chancellor of Osun State University, Prof. Clement Adebooye; and several other public officials as ghost workers.
He added that the government was responding through an official statement to clarify the matter, reject the allegations, and support affected workers who, he said, were preparing to seek legal redress over what they described as defamation.
Alimi said, “The workers affected included the Vice Chancellor of the Osun State University, staff of polytechnics, several top professors, Deans, provosts among others,” adding that “More than ten agencies alongside several tertiary institutions were not covered and workers in those agencies were declared ghost workers.”
The statement further read, “Osun public servants who were declared ghost workers by Sally Tibbot Limited have resolved to drag the company and the lead consultant to court for soiling and defaming their careers of several decades.
“In multiple reach out to the state government, the workers across various agencies decried the defamation and character assassination the consultant perpetrated by declaring them as ghost workers, vowing to seek redress in court of law.
“The workers were furious that the company is still referring to them as ghost workers after they had shown up for verification and had been duly captured and had even expressed readiness to show themselves to the company as genuine workers with unblemished records of service with the state government.”
The commissioner further stated that, “It is also on record that the consultant declared the state governor, the deputy governor, the Secretary to the state government and more than two thirds of political appointees in the state as ghost workers.”
Debunking allegations of a cover-up, Alimi described the Lagos press briefing by the firm as “a subtle blackmail to force a fraudulent staff audit report on the state,” adding that a re-verification exercise conducted by the government “shockingly revealed extensive inflation of the supposed number of ghost workers and which showed that those the company claimed were ghost workers were legitimate employees of the state government.”
He added that while the government remained committed to cleaning up the state payroll, “it can not in good conscience remove legitimate state government employees from the payroll and cannot submit to an audit report that has the potential to further defraud the state government.”
