The Nasarawa State Government has uncovered over 200 “ghost workers” in the Payment Vouchers (PV) of the various local government areas (LGAs).

Haruna Osegba, Commissioner for Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs, disclosed this during Local Government Joint Account Allocation Committee meeting on Friday in Lafia.

According to him, the names were discovered from the PVs during a recent system upgrade following the biometric data capturing of the council workers, NAN reports.

“The system deleted the names base on the biometric data capturing carried out in 2013.
“The implication is that the affected persons must have altered their records in order to still remain in service when they were supposed to retire,” Osegba added.

He said that in spite of the fact that workers retire every year across the 11 LGAs in the state, the wage bill of the workers still remained the same.

He urged all the chairmen of the LGAs to always communicate with the ministry whenever a staff retires to enable them remove their names from the PV.

He said the ministry had to augment the allocation from the federation account to the LGs with N404 million for the month of March in order to pay full salary to workers.