The Osun State Government has dismissed allegations of a ₦13 billion payroll fraud levelled against it by Sally Tibbot Limited, accusing the consulting firm of falsely labelling about 15,000 workers and retirees as “ghost employees” in a bid to claim a ₦2 billion commission.
In a statement obtained in Osogbo on Friday, the Commissioner for Information and Public Enlightenment, Kolapo Alimi, said a verification review of the consultant’s report showed that more than two-thirds of those listed as ghost workers were genuine staff with proper identification and documentation.
The Chief Executive Officer of the firm, Sa’adat Bakrin-Ottun, had earlier alleged during a programme on Channels Television that the administration of Ademola Adeleke failed to act on findings from the payroll verification exercise which she claimed exposed fraud.
Responding to the interview, Alimi said the consultant had been hired to sanitise a payroll system inherited from a previous administration but instead produced a report that wrongly classified many active workers as ghost staff.
He noted that the governor initially insisted the report be implemented, but discrepancies discovered during verification raised concerns about its credibility. According to him, the administration would welcome assistance from anti-corruption agencies such as the EFCC and the ICPC to identify any actual ghost workers, stressing that the government had nothing to conceal, especially since the audit covered payroll records from 2018 to November 2023.
Alimi also defended the governor’s elder brother, Deji Adeleke, saying his involvement arose after he received complaints that legitimate civil servants were being wrongly classified as ghost workers and sought to prevent unjust dismissals. He added that the consultant had been invited to present her findings directly to him for verification.
Explaining why the audit report was ultimately discarded, the commissioner said concerns intensified when the consultant’s technical team confirmed that a replacement payroll system intended to succeed Chams software had never been tested anywhere, raising red flags among state officials.
He further disclosed that a joint review committee later found major discrepancies: of 8,448 workers listed as “unseen,” 8,015 were verified as active staff while 433 could not be reached. Similarly, out of 6,713 retirees classified as ghost pensioners, 5,830 were confirmed genuine and 883 remained unreachable.
According to Alimi, the consultant allegedly inflated the ghost-worker figure to 15,000 in order to justify a commission claim of about ₦2 billion. He said once the number of unverifiable workers dropped below 1,000, the firm’s payment entitlement was reduced to roughly ₦47 million.
He also alleged that repeated invitations for the firm to review and reconcile its figures were ignored, claiming it continued to rely on what the state described as flawed statistics.
The commissioner stated that following the discrepancies, the government abandoned the report and implemented a locally developed payroll reform system while reiterating its readiness for independent investigation.
ELIJAH ADEYEMI
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