Municipality flushes out ghost employees

The Maluti-a-Phofung Local Municipality has launched a probe into ghost employees after realising discrepancies in the employee database

The Maluti–a-Phofung Local Municipality is currently conducting a head count of all its employees in a bid to crack down on ghost employees who are largely responsible for draining the borough’s finances.

A discrepancy came to light last month, regarding the total workforce of the municipality. One record showed the municipality to be having 1 210 employees while another reflected an inflated 1 462.

This is what prompted the authorities to start the counting of every worker, a process that involves capturing every employee’s photo and verifying the authenticity of their identity document.

In an interview with The Weekly on Monday, the acting executive mayor of Maluti-a-Phofung Local Municipality, Vusi Tshabalala, confirmed that the process is already underway in QwaQwa, Kestell and Harrismith.

“Together with the office of the acting municipal manager, we have established that there were dead people on the municipality’s payroll. This means we are being ripped off. We have also discovered that people who no longer work here still earn salaries.

“We have evidence of one person who is residing in Johannesburg but is in our payroll; we have already contacted that person,” disclosed Tshabalala.

He maintained that conducting a head count is the only way to verify the exact number of people who actually work for the municipality.

“We already have cases of employees who do not match their ID photos. We are still in the process of counting and the exact number of fictitious employees has not yet been fully determined.”

During this week’s visit at the municipality offices, The Weekly gathered that some employees did not understand why they were being counted and photographed.

“We do not know why these people want to take pictures of us. I want to see if all the workers will go through this process,” said one of the employees who did not want to be named.