- From the available data, the exact number of staff in Siaya County government cannot be conclusively determined
- The taskforce noted that the process of recruitment, deployment and remuneration of casual staff appears to be unregulated, devoid of standards of practice
Neither the Siaya County Public Service Board nor the human resource department of the county can tell the number of employees working at the devolved unit, it has emerged.
This is even as the county leadership continues to raise concerns over the ever-ballooning wage bill.
A task force appointed by Governor James Orengo to conduct system audit and governance reforms in the county government could not ascertain the exact number of people hired to work for the county.
While the county public service board denied the existence of a manual roll that's used to pay casuals without personal numbers, the human resource officers gave conflicting figures during interviews with the task force chaired by retired Auditor General Edward Ouko.
This made it impossible for the team to establish the correct number of those serving as casuals.
"From the available data, the exact number of staff in Siaya county government cannot be conclusively determined," Ouko revealed.
However, it emerged that the trade docket, which is tasked with the generation of its own source revenue had the highest number of people serving as casuals, after the department of health.
The task force noted that the process of recruitment, deployment and remuneration of casual staff appears to be unregulated, devoid of standards of practice
The analysis by the seven-member task force established that the bulk of the staff in the revenue docket are casual employees.
According to the task force, this is particularly owing to the fact that staff under casual employment terms are recruited directly by departments and no central database exists for this cadre.
The report states that the county public service board has no knowledge or control over the recruitment of this cadre.
The task force concluded that there is every possibility that the county government could be harbouring ghost workers in their thousands.
In October 2019, ex-governor Cornel Rasanga formed a salary committee that was meant to help rid the county government of ghost workers.
When a decision was made by the committee to have all the county staff collect their pay through cheques, a total of 111 cheques were never collected in October 2019.
The 111 uncollected cheques and questionable IDs and files were handed to EACC and DCI for further investigation by the then-county secretary.
The report by Ouko team revealed that shadowy individuals were using falsified identities to collect salaries from the devolved government's coffers, a scheme which could only succeed through collusion by a clique of corrupt Individuals in the HR and finance departments.
"There's a clear lack of capacity within the board and the directorate of human resources with few human resources specialists," Ouko's report says.
The 60-page report that was handed over to Orengo on Friday indicates that the county payroll is run on two separate platforms.
The task force discovered instances of double payment, duplication of names, falsification of identities and absence of identification numbers.
“It is to be noted that average monthly manual payroll alone incurs the county government of Siaya an average of Sh 53 million," Ouko said