* Sell one-sheet audit form for N1, 500
Cross River State Government officials in the Office of the Head of Service, have perfected and implemented a plan to milk civil servants across the state of various sums of monies under carefully thought out subheads, an ongoing investigation by www.calitown.com has revealed.
At the time of this report, information available on several LG staff related Whatsapp platforms, urging unit heads at the local government level to enforce collection of sums of money for a state wide staff audit of local government staff, is still trending.
“Good morning all. This is to inform you that officials from head of service office will be in the LGA for personel audit by next week . The cost of the form for auditing is 1500 while their entertainment is 500 making a total of 2000. There will be with us for 2days so is incumbent on us to give them a cup of cold water. So pls inform your staff and come with the money during heads of unit meeting so that you can pick the forms for your people … get the money so that you can pick the forms for them accordingly. Pls get the money from all the environmental health officer’s as well, and inform those in school because this will be used in the payment of July salary. Pls treat as important and urgent”, the information specified.
Simple checks carried out revealed that as at January 2022, a little more than 8, 600+ (eight thousand six hundred plus) civil servants are employed in the state local government system. If just 8,000 staff, pay N1,500 for a one-sheet audit form, officials somewhere walk away with a princely N12 million. For the “cup of cold water” talked about in the message, for staff sent in to conduct the audit, at N500 × 8000, officials pocket another N4 million, bringing the total haul to N16 million.
As expected, officials in the Office of the Head of Service, CRS, volunteered no information when asked to confirm if the office instructed and approved this collection. But one official who did not want his name in print insisted that, “these collections have survived several Heads of Service in this state. Everyone who comes, creates financial subheads for ferrying money into personal pockets. Where you not here when this same office activated the forceful deduction of money from the salaries of even drivers and security men for personal computers? Did they actually need these computers? No. It was simply a subhead for the financial empowerment of men and women at the top.”
We can authoritatively confirm that the audit will commence next week and all collections are presently being enforced.
