Johannesburg - Mpumalanga Treasury has begun their process of verifying over 80 000 employees on the personal and salary system( PERSAL) in the provincial government to eliminate possible ghost workers.
This comes after a revelation of alleged ghost workers in municipalities such as Mangaung municipality, Greytown’s Umvoti Municipality and Msunduzi municipality in KwaZulu-Natal that have been found to have between 50 to 100 ghost workers, amongst others in the past few years.
The verification process of over 83 187 employees which began in March is aimed at establishing the authenticity of employees against the PERSAL system and will be conducted by biometric fingerprint system.
The process is expected to be completed by the second quarter of the year.
MEC for Finance, Economic Development and Tourism, Mr Vusi Mkhatshwa said the staff verification project was one of the expenditure control measures aimed at ensuring the credibility of the provincial budget management.
“The principal objective of this exercise is to ensure that public funds are paid to existing personnel who are contributing to the functioning of the provincial government,” he said.
This project by the Provincial Government is in line with section 18 of the Public Finance Management Act, No. 1 of 1999 which requires the Provincial Treasury to promote and enforce transparency and effective management in respect of revenue, expenditure, assets and liabilities of provincial departments and provincial public entities.
The budget allocated to the Provincial Treasury for the 2022/23 financial year is over R566m.
The budget has been allocated to the four programmes:
The Administration is receiving R127.8m.
The Sustainable Resource Management is allocated R93.1m.
The Assets & Liabilities Management gets R291.7m.
The Financial Governance receives R53.8m.
IOL