The committee set up by the Bauchi State Government to verify workers without Bank Verification Numbers on Monday said it has so far cleared 4, 654 civil servants out of the over 19,000 workers earlier said to be without BVN.
The Chairman of the committee, Senator Adamu Gumba, disclosed this in Bauchi in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria.
He said that the committee had recommended to the state government to pay those verified their October and November salaries.
According to him, 14,346 more staff would be screened by the committee before the end of the week while 9, 889 pensioners that were found not to have the BVN would also be screened.
“We have also discovered during our assignments that about eight or more workers on the payroll of the state government are using one BVN to collect salaries.
“We have further discovered that in some instances one worker is employed and paid salaries by six or more agencies.
“We have also discovered in the course of the assignment that some state government employees are working for some federal government agencies in Abuja and collecting salaries from Bauchi State coffers.
“We discovered in other instances that some BVNs presented by workers during the authentication have been scanned therefore it means it is someone else’s BVN but the culprits pasted their pictures and photocopied it,” he disclosed.
Gumba revealed that the committee had set up six sub-committees and were deployed to the 20 Local Government Councils in the state to conduct similar exercise.
He emphasised that the exercise was not meant to witch hunt any worker or pensioner but to fish out ghost workers and fake pensioners.
The chairman, therefore, apologised to genuine workers that were subjected to hardship due to non-payment of their salaries during the exercise.