The Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation(OHCSF),has detected and removed the names of about 1,500 civil servants with fake letters of appointment from the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS).
Dr. Folasade Yemi-Esan, Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, announced this in her keynote address at the 4TH National Policy Dialogue on “Entrenching Transparency in Public Service Recruitment in Nigeria’’ organised by the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) in Abuja.
Yemi-Esan said the names of the affected workers were removed from the IPPIS between 2021 to 2022.
She explained that with the institutionalisation of the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS), the Federal Government has been able to track fake employments, thereby reducing the risk of employing less efficient, unqualified and undependable personnel to handle the affairs of government.
According to her, in “about 1,000 fake letters were turned-in and just a week ago about 500 of such letters were brought to OHCSF for the removal of such officers from the IPPIS platform.”
She said the Federal Government has through various means continued to explore possible ways to bridge the unemployment gap in the country by instituting ways and means of ensuring that the right people are recruited into the public service for national growth and development.
According to her,:“a multi-pronged and cross-cutting approach, especially through the various social safety net programmes which drive the government’s ambition to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and to lift more than 100 million Nigerians out of poverty in the next 10 years has been introduced.”
She also emphasized the need for the acquisition of skills to reduce the rate of dependence on public service jobs.
“The country’s unemployment problem has left job seekers at the mercy of unscrupulous elements who extort and defraud them by exploiting their very desperate conditions, and it should be emphasised that no sector is spared from the antics of the perpetrators.”
She further advocated a merit-based recruitment system in public service such as that of India, which is also diversed.
To get it right in a transparent and accountable manner, the Head of the Civil Service called for the digitalisation of recruitment processes through the use of e-recruitment solutions in order to eliminate human contact to the barest minimum as well as partnership with private sector, as a window to showcasing the capacity of the civil service.
She added that both the appointees of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC) and the Presidency should undergo due recruitment processes to ensure that only the right and best candidates for the job emerge.
In his remarks, the chairman of the ICPC, Prof. Bolaji Owasanoye, emphasised the need for the Policy Dialogue sessions, saying that indiscriminate recruitment has negatively impacted on personnel budget such that government personnel wage bill has continued to rise due to recruitment scams.
