Nine people have reportedly been arrested by security forces working with the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) for running a fake recruitment into the agency.
Although officials have kept mum on the issue, unnamed sources say Alex Oki, David Kachia, Yakubu Tanko, Mohammed Shuaibu, Kehinde Jamah, Ogbonna Agwu, Aminu Ibrahim, Pascal Ajah and Chris Onyekachi have all been under investigation for months on allegations of forgery of documents, impersonation of officials of the FIRS and other federal ministries, agencies and banks officials. They are also alleged to have deceived members of the public and soliciting money to facilitate the promotion of FIRS officials.
The suspects are also said to have made use of a host of websites, email addresses, computers, telephone lines and bank accounts and were spread over different parts of Abuja, promising to help staff of the agency to gain promotion.
Their activities were exposed after one of them sent a message to a senior staff of the FIRS asking him for money to facilitate his promotion. Since the FIRS had just recently conducted a promotion exercise, the unnamed official reported the matter to the authorities, leading to arrest of the suspects.
Items recovered from the suspects include FIRS staff records, complimentary cards, polythene bag containing bank deposit slips and documents from several ministries and federal government agencies.
The agency had also recently put up public announcements in several tabloids and on its website that it was not recruiting at the moment.
A statement on the agency’s website states reads: “This is to inform the general public that FIRS is neither recruiting nor replacing unfilled positions within its workforce. Anybody submitting his/her CV or applying through any website, responding to sms, texts any online medium, social media platforms or in whatever form, for employment with FIRS, is doing so at his or her own risk.
“Please note that employment into the FIRS, will be advertised in national newspapers as well as on the FIRS website www.firs.gov.ng. Members of the public are hereby strongly advised to avoid being deceived or defrauded by unscrupulous and dubious characters, the statement running on the FIRS website for over two months now read.”
