N13.7bn Payroll Fraud Row: Adeleke’s Govt, Opposition In Fired-up Exchange

JOSHUA DADA writes on the ongoing war of words between the Osun state government and interested parties on the alleged N13.7bn payroll fraud in the state, and the call on both the EFCC and the ICPC to probe the allegation.

As the controversy over the alleged N13.7bn payroll fraud in Osun State rages, parties involved have called on anti-graft agencies, including the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), to unravel the circumstances behind the scandal.

The Osun state government had contracted Sally Tibbot Consultant Nig. Ltd, in 2023, with the task of sanitising the civil service by identifying ghost workers and blocking leakages in government.

Though the people of Osun State did not know what agreement was signed by Sally Tibbot and the state government, the auditing firm carried out the assignment diligently. But civil servants in the state were said to have complained of high-handedness during the exercise.

However, the Osun State government came to the defence of the auditing firm at the time and directed workers to cooperate with and comply with the firm’s demands during the staff auditing exercise.

When the consultant released its findings, the government claimed it detected some abnormalities and became suspicious of the firm’s intent under the agreement.

The agreement, it was learned, stipulated that the government would pay the firm based on the savings it generated, meaning that the greater the audit savings, the higher the firm’s share of income.

Hence, the Vice Chairman of Sally Tibbot Consulting (Nig.) Ltd declared 15,000 workers, comprising 8,448 workers in service and 6,713 unaccounted for, who were being paid N315,317,664.03 monthly, totalling N13.7bn annually as ghost workers.

The Vice Chairman of the company, Mrs Saadat Ottun, claimed that the report was submitted to the government in the presence of the governor’s brother, Dr Deji Adeleke, and that the parties demonstrated to the world, with visual evidence, how delighted the government was during the submission.

She also alleged the involvement of the governor’s chief of staff, Hon. Kazeem Akinleye, in the fraud and presented a phone conversation in which Akinleye allegedly threatened and admitted to being in possession of the missing funds.

Ottun said her company will recover the funds involved in the contract through due process, but insisted that it is imperative that the general public know what the government was trying to cover up.

She alleged that the state government was desperate to forget the alleged fraud, adding that the state and the governor were not ready to implement their findings.

But the Osun State government insisted that there was no such thing as N13.7bn fraud and that Sally Tibbot was only playing the script of the opposition political party. The Osun government, through its commissioner for Information and Public Enlightenment, Oluomo Kolapo Alimi, who debunked the allegations, described the allegations as a subtle attempt to force a fraudulent staff audit report on the state.

He stated that the unusually high number of alleged ghost workers detected by the consultant led to a re-verification exercise, which revealed extensive inflation of the supposed number of ghost workers and showed that those the company claimed were ghost workers were actually legitimate state government employees.

According to him, the state government further proposed to furnish the company with proof of the existence of each of these workers, if the same is required, adding that the company did not at any point in time request such proof nor send an acceptance letter for payment based on about 1,316 workers who were not seen.

The government noted that the entire saga became more suspicious, especially as the company’s fees were based on the amount of money it saved the state government on the payroll, indicating that the company’s claim was based on greed

The state government further submitted that, while it was eager to clean up the state payroll, it cannot, in good conscience, remove legitimate state government employees from the payroll or submit to an audit report that could further defraud the state government.

Submitting that it is within its right to review an audit report before implementation, the government noted that the existence of open gaps, verifiable lapses, several battles during the audit process and a high number of ghost workers compelled the setting up of a verification committee as a prelude to the implementation of the staff audit report.

Alimi said, “Sally Tibbot Consulting (Nig.) Ltd had declared 8,448 workers as unseen workers, while 6,713 retirees were declared as ghost retirees. But the conclusion was reached by the company without making any effort to call each of these workers to ascertain the reason for their absence.

”Upon the receipt of the report of the exercise carried out by Sally Tibbot Consulting (Nig.) Ltd, in order to avoid a situation where an honest worker would be declared a ghost worker only by reason of such worker’s absence from verification, especially if the reason for such absence is ill-health, the Osun state Government carried out an in-depth analysis of the report and the following was discovered:

“Out of the total number of 8,448 workers declared by Sally Tibbot Consulting (Nig.) As unseen workers, the Osun State Government confirmed 8,015 active workers, while 433 were unreachable.

“Also, out of the total number of 6,713 retirees declared as ghost workers by Sally Tibbot Consulting (Nig.) As unseen workers, the Osun State Government confirmed the existence of 5,830 retirees, while 883 could not be reached.

“The implication of this is that the percentage claim payable to Sally Tibbot Consulting (Nig.) Ltd reduced drastically by virtue of the fact that the said Sally Tibbot Consulting (Nig.) Ltd attempted to reap where she did not sow by inflating the number of ghost workers/retirees to 15,161 when, in actual fact, the unseen workers/retirees are about 1,316”.

Alimi said that Governor Adeleke will be more than elated if the EFCC and the ICPC can help to identify the ghost workers. “So the call by Sally Tibbot for the involvement of the anti-corruption agencies is most warmly welcomed.  The governor has nothing to hide, especially as the payroll audit in question was between 2018 and November 2023”.

In defence of the role played by Dr Deji Adeleke, Governor Adeleke’s spokesman, Mallam Olawale Rasheed, said his involvement was a result of information he received that bona fide civil servants were being declared as ghost workers, and he wanted to ensure that no bona fide civil servants were unjustly laid off or dismissed.

“As he promised in 2022 to be a watchdog for good governance, Dr Deji intimated the governor of emerging negative reports and the governor, in a bid to validate the audit report, brought the consultant to Dr Deji’s residence to prove the validity of her report,” Rasheed said.

Corroborating the position of the Osun State government, Osun State University threatened to drag the consultant to court for declaring some of their staff, including the vice chancellor, Prof. Odunayo Clement Adebooye and some officers of the university, as ghost workers.

The Vice Chancellor contended that Sally Tibbot seemed to be grossly unfamiliar with and ignorant of the operations of the University system, adding that she was evidently not knowledgeable on such terms as “Sabbatical leave”, “Study leave”, “Visiting lecturer”, “Research Leave”, etc.

“This ignorance made her willfully ignore the list of employees who were on Sabbatical leave, study leave, research leave, etc. and went ahead to categorise them and several workers (on ground) as ghost workers”, the vice chancellor maintained.

Adebooye, who contended that though he presented himself during the verification exercise in 2023, yet he was listed among the ghost workers declared by the consultant.

His words: “Even though I was present throughout the exercise and was even assisting to calm angry workers down, Mr Sally Tibbot’s report categorised me as a ghost worker. What an insult to my personality and the Office of the Vice-Chancellor!

“The University unequivocally questions the methodological basis upon which the ghost workers list was drawn, particularly in the light of documented evidence of physical verification. “As a University, we question the quality of the biometric tools and data science skills of Sally Tibbot”.

The vice chancellor, who meticulously explained the auditing process, expressed doubts about the firm’s competence to conduct such an exercise in tertiary academic institutions.

“The Osun State University feels unrepentant to state that the audit report bythe  Sally Tibbot, especially the sea ction that listed the Vice-Chancellor and 249 legitimate workers of the University as ghost workers is useless documentation meant to be thrown into paper shredding machine” Adebooye said.

Probably the dragging in of the administration of former Governor Adegboyega Oyetola into the controversy, with the government alleging that, if there were any ghost workers, it was his administration that created them, infuriated the state All Progressives Congress (APC).

The party at a press conference aired on some radio stations live also called on the anti-graft agencies to intervene in the matter and help get back Osun State government from those concerned i,n the alleged fraud.

The party chairman, Tajudeen Lawal, who particularly raised alarm over the submission of the audit report to Dr Deji Adeleke rather than the governor, called on Deji Adeleke to expose his brother’s government atrocities, as he pledged to do whenever such occurred.

His words: “Osun is bleeding. Terribly bleeding. Whoever foisted Governor Adeleke on this state, despite evident concerns about his controversial academic credentials, incompetence, and intellectual hollowness, must reflect deeply, as history will judge such actions. Osun State has not only become a subject of public scrutiny among the comity of states but has also been deprived of the progress and prestige it once enjoyed.

“The alleged complicity of Dr Deji Adeleke and of the Chief of Staff to the Governor, Alhaji Kazeem Akinleye, alongside other key members of the governor’s inner circle, raises serious concerns that non-state actors and those not known to law collude with characters entrusted with the administration of the state over the past three years to shortage the people of the state and illegally enrich themselves with the wealth of the people.

“We call on statutory anti-corruption agencies, particularly the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission ( EFCC), to thoroughly investigate the alleged payroll fraud and determine the extent of culpability of all individuals involved, especially Dr Deji Adeleke and Alhaji Kazeem Akinleye”

Apparently worried by a massive media war against the government with alleged denial of the government’s defence on the matter, the spokesperson to the governor, Rasheed, declared that the government has petitioned the EFCC and challenged Sally Tibbot and her lead Counsel, Jiti Ogunye, to submit their evidence and proofs to the anti-graft agency instead of spewing falsehood and lies across media stations.

While condemning the consultant’s regular attacks on the Chief of Staff, the spokesperson defended the Chief of Staff’s role to the Governor, Hon Kazeem Akinleye, as a strong buffer against a near-successful attempt to defraud Osun state.

”Neither the governor nor the Chief of Staff has any regret for upholding due process, rule of law, labour laws and anti-corruption statutes in the staff audit matter. The state and her people are proud of their sense of patriotism to reject inducement to uphold public integrity and transparency,” Rasheed said.

The PDP aligns completely with the position already made public by the Osun State Government, saying that the allegation is nothing but an APC-sponsored propaganda built around a deeply disputed audit report whose coverage period predates the assumption of office of Governor Ademola Adeleke.

The chairman of the party in the state, Sunday Bisi, said, “We understand that the staff audit exercise in question covered the most troubling era of payroll manipulation between 2018 and November 2022, a period dominated largely by the APC administration.

“Therefore, if truly there were fraudulent payment schedules amounting to over ₦13 billion annually, moral responsibility and explanation must rest squarely at the doorsteps of the APC, which superintended the payroll architecture during those years”

The party challenges the APC to stop the propaganda and instead present verifiable evidence, if any, to anti-corruption agencies rather than staging media ‘callisthenics’.

But the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) contended that Governor Adeleke owed the Osun people an open apology and a deep explanation on the matter.  The Osun state chapter chairman, Dr Tosin Odeyemi, queried why Governor Ademola Adeleke contracted Sally Tibbot Consulting Limited, which they are now describing as an “incompetent firm” in the first place.

He said, “Adeleke should immediately confess how many of such slave contracts he has entered into on behalf of the state through his incompetence, adding that in sane claim, the mess around the Staff audit is enough for the public.

However, a civil society organisation based in Osun, the Congress of Progressive Youths, recommended the immediate commissioning of a globally respected accounting firm, such as KPMG, PwC, or Deloitte, to either scrutinise the report of Sally Tibbot Nigeria Limited or restart staff audits.

The group, through its Director General Ibrahim Aderinto, contended that the claim that it is the opposition party using Sally Tibbot to blackmail the Governor Ademola Adeleke government is, because of the forthcoming election, logically confusing.

Nigerians, especially Osun people, are patiently awaiting the outcome of the call for the intervention of anti-graft agencies into the alleged N13.7bn payroll fraud.