Rivers Verification Exercise ‘ll Flush Out Ghost Workers -HoS … Allays Fear Of Salary Delay 

The Acting Head of the Rivers State Civil Service,  Dr (Mrs) Inyingi Brown, says the ongoing reverification of civil servants in the State will assist in flushing out ghost workers in the system.

The government launched a five-day civil servants’ verification exercise to stamp out ghost workers and other fraudulent activities from its services.

The exercise will cover all levels of the government employees across the state and local government areas including pensioners.

Speaking during the exercise at the state secretariat complex in Port Harcourt, last Friday, the Acting Head of Service, Dr Brown said the exercise would also streamline the staff database and payroll system.

She said, “We are doing three things at the same time, we are re-verifying civil servants and pensioners. We are doing fresh biometrics for local government staff and pensioners, we are also linking the payroll to the database, so that it becomes seamless.

“This exercise would help us fish out ghost workers, but it would not be immediate, it would be at the end of the day when we would be doing our final report.

“We have scheduled for each day and because the staff that we are attending to are the mainstream staff that work within the secretariat complex, that’s why we are having it here.

“We are hoping that in the next three weeks, we should have our numbers, we should know how many staff we have attended to and how many that are not available, so those who would come later to say they were not attended to, we would ask where were you when your colleagues were being attended to.”

She further explained that the last staff verification exercise was done in 2018, insisting that it was necessary to undertake another verification exercise.

“We have a database before now, but that database was not linked to our payroll, so we are doing this to revalidate the information we have in our database and the last time we updated our database was in 2018, from 2018 till now you know that so many things must have happened, ” She said.

“Some people may have passed on, some people may have left their jobs, but it has not been updated, so this exercise will enable us to update our database.”

She allayed fears raised in some quarters that the exercise would delay workers’ salaries.

“Some people expressed fears that this exercise would affect salaries, the Accountant- General informed me that before the end of today, salaries would be paid, so salaries would be paid as usual.

“In the end of the exercise, those people that we do not find in the database, or were not attended to during this exercise, those are the people that would be affected”, she said.

She also allayed some concerns raised by some labour leaders in the state that the government proposed contributory pensions scheme would shortchange pensioners and other staff due for retirement.

She said, “We have a committee that is looking at that and all the fears expressed would be addressed, the government is not insensitive, every genuine fear raised would be addressed before we launch into the scheme”.

On his part, the technical ICT lead for the verification, Austin Dimpka, emphasised that the process was robust and simple, adding that it will verify and authenticate submitted certificates and documents.

He said, “The process is very straightforward and robust, we have existing data already and we are just verifying the presence of each of the Staff, checking their existing documents to match what we have on the database already.

“So far, it has been very seamless from the entry to verification of documents, updating of new documents and biometrics capturing, it has been fantastic. After that, we would carry out names and document authentication and verification.”

Some of the workers who did their verification also confirmed that the process was seamless and fast.