19,203 workers got their job with fraudulent certificates – Auditor-General

The Auditor-General, Danile Domelevo, has revealed in his report to parliament that 19,203 workers are suspected to have landed their jobs with fraudulent academic certificates.

The report said: “During our examination of records, we suspected a total of 19,203 academic certificates presented during the enumeration exercise to be fraudulent.

“A total of 7,407 out of the 19,203 suspicious certificates were confirmed to be genuine and 62 found to be fake. Owing to the challenges encountered by the universities in querying our data, they were unable to confirm the outstanding 11,734 certificates.

“We therefore provided the data to the heads of MDAs/MMDAs to liaise with the awarding institutions to confirm the certificates and submit a report for our attention.”

The A-G has also noted to its report to parliament that 84 workers who have reached the compulsory retirement age are still on the payroll.

The A-G has therefore asked the Controller and Accountant General’s Department (CAGD) tackle that problem.

In the report, the AG said: “Owing to failure by CAGD to act on feedback from respective management heads, some 6,307 employees declared as “discontinued” through the ESPV system, continued to receive unearned salaries.

“We urged CAGD to terminate the records of all the discontinued employees on the payroll and ensure the full recovery of all the unearned salaries.

“For efficiency, we also recommended a seamless integration of the ESPV system with the payroll system thus resulting in prompt update of employee records.”

Regarding over-aged employees on active payroll, the report said : “We noted that the payroll system had not been properly configured to terminate automatically, records of employees who attain the statutory retirement age.

“Our review showed that, names of 84 employees who had attained the statutory retirement age, and had no contract extension, were still on the payroll. To ensure full compliance with the provisions of the Constitution, we urged CAGD to ensure proper configuration of the payroll system.”