FG set to distribute sack letters to 23,306 civil servants

President Muhammadu Buhari, in a bid to root out corruption from the civil service has ordered the probe of no fewer than 23,306 federal civil servants, who have been accused by a panel of defrauding the government of millions of Naira every month through an organized salary fraud.

According to preliminary reports by an investigation committee which was set up to unravel ghost workers and payments to multiple accounts, it disclosed that some banks and civil servants conspired to defraud the government.


With the shocking revelation, some banks might be called upon in the coming weeks to answer questions over the huge scam as they have been placed on surveillance.

In one of the bank’s branch, over 300 accounts were said to have been opened in one day and all the accounts have become inactive.

According to the PUNCH, highly placed federal civil servants and the banks, which had allegedly been indicted, have been marked down for thorough investigations and possible sanctions.

It added that the affected officers have started resigning their appointments as a pre-emptive measure to avert humiliation and sanctions at the end of the investigation.

A source said, “Out of the accounts of about 312,000 civil servants processed so far, the ministry has uncovered irregularities in about 23,306 of them. The account holders are suspected to have been collecting double salaries.

“These indicted individuals are in two categories. In the first group, we found out that the names of some civil servants, whose salaries are being processed, are different from the names on the accounts where their salaries are paid into. What this means is either those in this category are drawing salaries from two sources (which could be different parastatals), or they are ‘ghost’ workers.”

Further investigation showed that the salaries were being paid into some inactive accounts, which had fueled the belief that the Federal Government had been paying salaries to ‘ghost’ workers.

“The investigating committee discovered that in a particular branch of a bank, over 300 accounts of some civil servants were opened on the same day and all of them have become dormant.

“By the time the ongoing investigation is concluded, Nigerians will be shocked by the sheer number of top and other categories of civil servants, who may be forced to resign as a result of their complicity in the salary scam,” the source added.

The Special Adviser to the Minister of Finance on Media Matters, Festus Akanbi, who refused to give details on the scam, explained that the exercise was ongoing, adding that the public would be appropriately informed when the full report of the panel was submitted.

The Ministry of Finance had said the adoption of the BVN became unavoidable due to the failure of the Integrated Payroll Personnel Information System to effectively deal with the issue of ‘ghost’ workers in the federal civil service.

It would be recalled that the Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, had dismissed some civil servants in the ministry for collecting N400,000 each from 400 applicants whose names were then included in the IPPIS.