About 1,159 “employees” vanished from the payroll system of the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa) in a single day when the parastatal launched Operation Ziveze to crack down on ghost workers last year.
About R200 million in salaries was saved following the disappearance of these “employees” who were receiving salaries without doing any work for the agency. Prasa also noticed that its salary bill had dropped by R20 million a month during the investigations.
This was revealed by Transport Minister Fikile Mbalula during a media briefing on the preliminary investigations on ghost workers at Prasa.
Prasa launched Operation Ziveze last year after it noticed that there were 1300 ghost employees at the agency who were receiving salaries without doing any work.
Mbalula said widespread wrongdoing was allowed to take place at the rail company because of bad management.
Several steps have been taken to deal with the issue of these ghost employees. These are workers who have been earning monthly salaries but never physically clocked in at work. Some of the ghost employees proved to be fake.
Workers were asked to voluntarily come forward for verification.
Out of 17, 268 employees at Prasa, 14,268 presented themselves with documentation for verification and 1,159 disappeared from the system. Among those who disappeared were the lowest paid workers up to assistant managers. A total of 3000 employees failed to present themselves for the verification process.
Mbalula said Prasa hired a service provider to establish if these were indeed ghost employees and to highlight weaknesses within the system.
He said the investigations flagged 2,143 people as possible ghost employees or employees who pretended to be someone else, who had submitted fraudulent qualifications and some with “serious criminal offences”.
Mbalula said the investigation was conducted with the help from Home Affairs, South African Revenue Service, Umalusi and the South African Qualifications Authority.
“The investigation also revealed a number of instances where ID photos did not match the face of employees. This has triggered further investigations…This form of corruption cannot be characterised as anything other than stealing from the taxpayer. This is conduct we must all frown upon and encourage law enforcement agencies to act with the necessary speed to unleash the full might of the law on those hell-bent on stealing public funds,” Mbalula said.
Source: ENCA, Business Tech, Sowetan Live, image from Twitter: @StarFMNews919