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Leonard Ncube, Victoria Falls Reporter
GOVERNMENT has successfully addressed fears of existence of ghost workers in the civil service after the biometric audit introduced a few years ago showed a miniscule number of unregistered workers.

An audit of the civil service had unearthed a number of anomalies including the issue of ghost workers prompting calls for a biometric payroll whose aim was to accurately identify workers and pensioners for purposes of removing ghost workers from the payroll.

The biometric system has been used in other countries and yielded positive results including reducing public sector wage bill.

In an interview on the sidelines of a Public Service Commission (PSC) retreat in Victoria Falls, the commission secretary Ambassador Jonathan Wutawunashe said the biometric exercise had been a success and there are no ghost workers in Government.

“We have had a very encouraging outcome because we found out that indeed there were a number of people in the civil service whose biometric attributes were not, for one reason or another, found in the Registrar General’s office,” said Ambassador Wutawunashe.

He said some of them had had challenges being captured because they were holders of the old type of identity cards and were given an opportunity to present themselves so that they could not be punished for reasons which were not of their own making.

Some are people who work full time in the field and Ambassador Wutawunashe said there is progress in identifying them and making sure that they regularise.

“What we discovered after going through that exercise was that it was a miniscule number of civil servants who still remained with attributes still to be recorded at the Registrar General’s office and we have some clues as to what the reasons might be.

“We finally ended up with a statistically close to zero ghost workers and we can say that we have dealt with the risk in a very successful manner. The good news is that the biometric registration exercise was a success,” he said.

Meanwhile, Ambassador Wutawunashe warned civil servants against absenteeism from work saying Government will not hesitate to freeze salaries for those not executing their duties.

This comes amid reports that there are a number of Government workers who have not been receiving salaries for some months for not reporting for duty.

Ambassador Wutawunashe said if there are some civil servants who were erroneously identified as not reporting for work, they should submit their names to his office.

“It has to be made clear that civil servants who decide to absent themselves from their work stations cannot be paid,” he said.-@ncubeleon