The Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (PRASA) has saved over US$11 million of state funds, thanks to Project Ziveze designed to flash out ghost workers from the organisation, APA learnt on Tuesday.
The project, launched 10 months ago, was designed to verify genuine employees on PRASA’s payroll system, Transport Minister Fikile Mbalula said.
The minister revealed that during the first phase of the project all employees were invited on a voluntary basis to come forward to be verified with copies of their ID documents, qualifications and the Human Capital Management Employee Data forms.
“During this phase, out of the 17,268 recorded employees on PRASA’s payroll system, 14,268 employees presented themselves for verification,” Mbalula said.
He noted that “failure by 3,000 employees to come forward for physical verification led to suspicions that there could be a number of ghost employees at PRASA.”
The probe’s preliminary finding was not able to verify 1,480 employees, while some 1,159 workers resigned during the exercise, Mbalula said.
PRASA then commissioned the services of an independent service provider to establish if these were indeed ghost employees, and to identify weaknesses in the PRASA system as well as identifying culpable officials who may have colluded with unscrupulous people to create ghost employees where this was found to be the case.
According to the minister, the scope of the project extended to validating whether the employment of foreign nationals was in line with the provisions of the law, he said.
“We are on course to rid PRASA of all forms of corruption. Those officials who aid and abet these dastardly deeds of corruption will face the full might of the law,” Mbalula said.
NM/jn/APA