MAPUTO, Sept 30 (The African Portal) – Mozambican authorities have identified more than 18,000 “ghost workers” on the public payroll, officials said on Monday, in a fraud scheme that diverted state salaries to non-existent employees.
The Minister of State Administration, Inocencio Impissa, said most of the names flagged were people who had died, retired or left public service but whose wages were still being collected.
“Based on the systems we have been introducing, we have been able to detect situations in which wages have been stolen,” Impissa said at a ceremony in Xai-Xai to mark the International Day of Universal Access to Information. He added that around 18,000 such cases had been removed from payrolls in the past year.
Impissa could not say how much the fraud had cost the state, noting “each of the employees has a different wage, depending on his category.” A team is calculating the losses, he said.
Some managers failed to update records after employees died or retired, allowing payments to continue. “The lack of updating allows the system to go on thinking that this person is still alive,” Impissa said.
He added that investigations were under way to identify those responsible. “It is our job to detect the problems and risks, and naturally to discover who is responsible for this,” he said.
Public employees are required to prove once a year that they are still alive, often by travelling long distances to government offices. But Impissa said the “proof of life” system had not been sufficient to eliminate fraud.
This story was written with additional files from AIMNews
