A Kuwaiti civil servant has been sentenced to five years in prison after collecting a decade’s worth of government salaries without showing up to work—a case authorities describe as one of the country’s most striking examples of public-sector salary fraud.
According to Kuwaiti media, the Court of Cassation handed down the tough sentence and ordered the unnamed worker to repay roughly $339,000 in salaries he never earned, along with double that amount as a financial penalty, bringing the total fine to about $1 million.
Court records show the man held a position in the Citizens’ Service Department but failed to report for duty for ten years, even as his salary continued to hit his bank account monthly. The anomaly eventually triggered a criminal probe into unlawful enrichment and abuse of public funds.
Although two lower courts had previously acquitted him, the Court of Cassation overturned those rulings, describing the evidence as overwhelming and the misconduct deliberate.
Kuwaiti newspaper Al Qabas reported that the ruling stands among the strongest anti-corruption judgments in recent years, part of a broader effort to clamp down on absenteeism and “ghost workers” within the public sector.
Nigeria faces a similar Problem—but with a global twist
The case echoes a growing scandal in Nigeria, where President Bola Tinubu recently ordered a nationwide crackdown after revelations that some government employees who emigrated abroad continue to receive monthly salaries from their former offices.
Earlier this year, the BBC uncovered the case of a UK-based taxi driver who still receives his Nigerian government salary—150,000 naira (about $100)—despite leaving the country two years ago without resigning. The man, identified under a pseudonym, said he kept the job as a “backup plan” and maintained the arrangement through an understanding with a senior official who happens to be a relative.
President Tinubu said he was “struck” by reports of civil servants drawing salaries from overseas and vowed that not only should the salaries be refunded, but supervisors who enabled the fraud “must also be punished.”
Nigeria has long struggled with the phenomenon known locally as ghost-working, where individuals—sometimes entirely fictitious—are kept on government payrolls. Despite repeated purges, independent estimates suggest thousands of such cases remain undetected.
Tinubu’s critics, however, argue that while the administration frequently announces reforms, concrete follow-through remains weak. They point to high-profile spending on new presidential aircraft and luxury residences as examples that contradict the government’s stated commitment to cutting waste.
For both Kuwait and Nigeria, the cases underscore an enduring and costly challenge: entrenched public-sector corruption that continues to drain national resources even as governments pledge reform.
