Nairobi, Jan. 27 -- About a quarter of workers in 26 counties could be non-existent, special audits on payrolls have revealed, raising concerns of possible fraud that may have cost taxpayers billions of shillings.

This follows the inability of public auditors to trace 25.3 percent of workers sampled to verify their existence, despite several attempts to reach the 596 employees who were paid Sh978 million over just three years.

In separate audits of counties' payroll management, Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu sampled 2,354 workers from payrolls and asked county governments to present them for physical verification. Of these, 596 did not turn up.

The failure by more than a quarter of the sampled employees to physically present themselves...