As the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) struggle with the shortage of teachers across the country and as the Junior Secondary teachers continue to wait for their salaries, an audit shows that TSC “erroneously” paid 466 million shillings to teachers.
An audit running through June 2021 shows that “erroneous” payments might have drained at least 3 billion shillings from the Teachers Service Commission (TSC). The audit shows that the cash cannot be recovered.
The audit also showed that TSC did not remit about 2 billion shillings in taxes that had been deducted from teachers, showing the extent of the rot within TSC.
The Auditor General also said that some of the money paid out “erroneously” might have been paid to ghost teachers between the years 1988 and 2000 and the commission will never be able to recover it.
There have been allegations that some senior officials within the TSC and the Ministry of Education have ghost schools and ghost teachers who drain education funds from both the Ministry and the TSC.
The report also shows that TSC paid about 10.5 million shillings in salary advances. Most of the cash paid as “salary advances” was undocumented while the rest was never recovered during the payment of salaries.
The Teachers Service Commission is the only teachers’ employer in Kenya with more than 400,000 members under it. The Commission recently hired about 35,000 teachers who were dispatched to teach the Junior Secondary Schools.
Three months since some of the teachers were employed, they have not received their salaries with the teachers’ employer blaming it on the confusion occasioned by the different reporting times of the teachers.
TSC has also been struggling to pay teachers on time with teachers threatening to down their tools if their salaries will continue coming in late. For the month of April, teachers were paid on the 28th day instead of the 24th day as they are used to.
