EWN reports that the Passenger Rail Agency of SA (Prasa) may have been paying salaries to about 3,000 ghost employees for years.

The Prasa board of control, under the leadership of Leonard Ramatlakane, briefed the media on Tuesday. Ramatlakane said the agency had a workforce of about 17,000 and that a skills auditing project had found there were many people getting salaries who could not be accounted for. "The project has already revealed over 2,000 people that exist, but they can't arrive to fetch their salary, so it shows that there is a problem that we have identified." Advocate Smanga Sethene said Prasa went through a verification process wherby workers had to bring their qualifications and IDs to their supervisors. He indicated that 14,000 came forward while 3,000 did not. "It could be that they are not coming forward for all sorts of reasons; they may be ghost employees who have been in the system undetected due to the inefficiencies that we have." He said this meant the agency might have been paying ghost employees all along.

• Read the original of the short report in the above regard by Kaylynn Palm at EWN

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