Mayor Muchadeyi Masunda said council authorities opened a salaries account at Kingdom Bank to address the problem of late payments.
He said some of the money had not been claimed for the past two months.
“It’s something that we stumbled on in the last two weeks,” Masunda said adding that he was not aware of the precise amount of money sitting in the account.
He said after the human resources audit carried out last year that revealed the ghost workers, council was now undertaking a validation exercise with the assistance of work study practitioners and the World Bank.
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The validation exercise is meant to establish the identity and qualifications of council employees and determine whether they are in the right position within council or not.
The city council last year embarked on a controversy-embroiled human resources audit, which revealed that there were hundreds of ghost workers listed on the council’s payroll.
“The findings were endorsed by council following recommendations of the human resources committee,” Masunda said.
“After the audit, 650 ghost workers were unearthed,” he said.
“When the headcount was done, some of them (employees) were neither physically there nor on leave, they were not present at their respective workstations.”
There are allegations that some of the council employees are not qualified for the posts allocated to them considering that they were appointed on political grounds.
