The Nigerian government said on Sunday that about 23,846 ghost workers were being removed monthly from its payroll.
The Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun, said consequently about N2.293 billion was reduced from the total salary bill for the ministries, departments and agencies MDAs for February 2016 when compared to December 2015 when the BVN audit process commenced.
The minister said the ghost workers were uncovered in payrolls of various MDAs during the ongoing bank verification number (BVN)-based staff audit and enrolment to the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS).
The BVN is a unique number that identifies each bank’s customer for “Know Your Customer” (KYC) purposes.
The use of BVNs, rather than physical appearance of workers for biometric capture at the initial stage of verification, has significantly simplified and accelerated the progress of the payroll audit process and reduced the cost of implementation.
The BVN platform to audit and sanitise the salary payment system, ministry of finance sources said, has so far checked the details of about 312,000 civil servants currently enrolled on IPPIS, a development that has led to the discovery of a high level of irregularities in salary payment.
During the audit, names of some civil servants whose salaries were being processed were found to be inconsistent with those linked to the bank accounts into which salaries were paid.
Individuals in this category were therefore found to have either been receiving salaries from multiple sources in different MDAs, or were ghost workers.
The spokesperson to minister, Festus Akanbi, explained that the figure represented a percentage of the total number of ghost workers that have been receiving salary from the various MDAs.
“Further investigation into other suspected cases of non-existent workers will continue in conjunction with operatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC),” Mr. Akanbi said.
He said the federal government was also pursuing the recovery of salary balances in bank accounts as well as any pension contributions in respect of the workers whose names have since been removed from the payrolls.
The removal of the affected names, the spokesperson said, were being undertaken in active collaboration with the concerned banks and the National Pension Commission (PENCOM).