Assessing the Efficacy of Budget in Controlling Fraudulent Personnel Cost Figure in Borno State Civil Service, Nigeria

The Borno State Government in its effort to rid the state civil service of the ghost worker syndrome made a lot of efforts such as verification of staff by consultants and physical head count of staff by committee. The present administration and its predecessors have all made that effort, but the syndrome seems far from over. It is in light of the above that this study seeks to investigate the Personnel Cost Budget of the state government in respect of education and health sectors to see if it assisted in controlling fraud in personnel cost. Both primary and secondary data were used for this research. Closed ended questionnaire was administered to personnel depart of the education and Health sectors, while the Borno state budget figure for these sectors are extracted from the State budget document of 2015 to 2019. These data were analysed by the use of Benford’s Law. The study found out that budget is being prepared annually on incremental basis using the previous year’s budget figure as basis. It also found out that the budgeted figure is always higher than the actual giving rise to favourable variance, and do not usual follow the pattern of Benford Law in which figures are supposed to appear in a numeric data setup in line with its rule.