The Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (HoCSF), Dr Folashade Yemi-Esan, has said that the verification exercises of the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS) have exposed 1,618 civil servants with 'fake/illegal' employment letters.
She also said that so far, 69,308 civil servants who participated in the compulsory verification exercise have been fully integrated into the IPPIS after their verifications.
She said this on Wednesday in Abuja, during a parley with media executives in commemoration of the 2024 Civil Service Week Celebrations.
Yemi-Esan said that as part of efforts to build the capacity and talent of civil servants, 8,905 workers were trained under the Structured Mandatory Assessment-Based Training Programme (SMAT-P) in the Federal Civil Service Strategy and Implementation Plan (FCSSIP 2021- 2025).
She said her fight against corruption in the civil service has led the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC) to identify and investigate over 3,600 public servants.
She said that as a result of the cleaning up, many people who were not supposed to be on the payroll including retirees had been removed.
"There are efforts to tackle Nigerians who have relocated abroad doing news jobs, but are still under the payroll of the civil service.
"The Federal Government is going hard on them, as many of them are voluntarily resigning after the physical verifications," Yemi-Esan said.
She said that civil servants who are outside the country without official permission and still on the payroll will be sacked after the ongoing verification is completed.
She said she did an overview of the report sent to her and discovered that a number of workers who had gone out of the country and were earning salaries were not even in the core ministries but mostly in the parastatals.
She accused some top officials who were supposed to give information to her office of connivance, saying it was discovered that those that were part of the deal to ensure that the positions were not declared vacant.
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"It is a Nigerian thing. We are running hard against the culture that tolerates it. Outsiders don't know the bashing we get every day trying to do the right thing.
"I expect that once the verification report comes anybody that is not in the country automatically losses his job.
"What we discovered in the last month of that verification is that most of them are now resigning their appointment which is a good development," Yemi-Ean said.
