Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi on Wednesday revealed plans to conduct an audit on usage of funds in the education sector; including higher education spending and at the Teachers Service Commission (TSC).
In an interview with Spice FM on Wednesday, Mbadi said, “Education. It is an area we are focused on, that we want to do a proper analytic audit of the money we spend under education from TSC.”
Mbadi further confirmed engaging the global United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to help with the analysis of the payroll system.
“I engaged UNDP, I spoke with them. They are also supposed to help us do an analysis of our systems to do an appraisal because that is an area they have competence,” Mbadi said.
Further expressing his concern over the TSC payroll in Kenya, he stated that UNDP had also shown concern over the irregularities noting, “They said there is a country which I will not mention, where they found the payroll had 17% ghost workers and Kenya may even be worse."
It is for this major reason that the CS believed that Kenya was in dire need of a system to clean up Kenya's public sector payroll and particularly in the education sector.
He also expressed concerns about the money spent on capitation not being properly monitored leading to several worrying trends including channeling of funds to students who do not exist.
The CS noted that the latter was an issue that was being handled in collaboration with the Education CS Julius Migos Ogamba.
On matters of payroll, he stated that he will be working with the Public Service CS Justin Muturi to ensure an audit is conducted to make sure that only teachers who exist are receiving salaries.
Mbadi reminisced his years as the chair of the National Assembly Committee on Public Accounts. He noted the committee handled several cases involving public employees receiving salaries long after they were deceased.
“When I was chair of the public accounts committee, you’d be amused that we found so many teachers who were being paid after they were deceased so if you can pay deceased teachers then you can pay non-existent teachers,” Mbadi said.
He also highlighted the need to have a system that automatically transitions retired teachers from payroll to pension to ensure retirees do not encounter hurdles in a quest to receive their dues.
"We want a system that would transit teachers from payroll to pension. And any Kenyan, if you have been working and now you are retiring. It should automatically transit you,” he said.
