Mucho

The woman had worked in the same office for nine years. Every December the manager asked the staff to contribute toward a gift for the director. She always paid. This year he asked for ₦25,000 from each of the 46 workers. The total announced was ₦1.15 million. On the day of the presentation the gift was a set of suitcases that cost ₦380,000 in the shop. She asked, quietly, what had happened to the rest of the money. The manager said there had been extra expenses. He did not list them. She went home and wrote down every contribution she could remember from the past five years. The following morning she asked three colleagues whether they still had their receipts. Two of them did. Together they calculated that at least ₦4.6 million had been collected in those five years. The gifts that had been presented never exceeded ₦600,000 in any year. She typed the figures into a simple table and sent it to the director’s official email and to the company’s internal audit address. She did not put her name. The audit team called a meeting two days later. The manager was asked to bring every record of the collections. He brought a notebook that showed only the most recent year. When he was asked about the earlier years he said the old notebooks had been damaged by rain. The director looked at the table the anonymous email had contained and asked the manager to explain the gap in front of the staff. The manager said some of the money had been used to repair the office generator. The facilities officer, who was present, said the generator had not been repaired in three years.