NewStats: 3,262,877 , 8,178,441 topics. Date: Tuesday, 03 June 2025 at 09:47 PM 1i2l1u

The outcry over the menace of ghost worker fraud reverberated in the Senate yesterday when the finance minister, Kemi Adeosun, threw a bombshell by revealing that, with the help of the Biometric Verification Number (BVN) policy, it has been discovered that one civil servant alone collected 20 salaries every month.

She also told the Senate Committee on Finance that the 23,000 ghost workers discovered in the Federal Civil Service would be handed over to EFCC for prosecution.

The adoption of BVN in processing salary payments by the federal government had stunningly thrown up no fewer than 23,000 ghost names on its payroll, a development that raised concerns about the huge amount of monies that may have been stolen from the nation’s coffers through such leakages in the federal civil service.

“What the IPPIS-BVN registration has shown us has been a real revelation. We have identified that there are people who appear on our payroll multiple times. BVN links all the s of that person, so we are seeing in our payroll 20 names to one BVN number,” Adeosun said during a budget defence session by the Federal Ministry of Finance before the committee.

The awestruck Senate committee agreed with the minister and directed that the attorney-general of the federation, Abubakar Malami, begin the prosecution and sanctioning of all individuals, firms and banks that aided the inclusion of the 23,000 ghost workers on federal government’s payroll.

LEADERSHIP FRIDAY had also reported exclusively that with the help of the ongoing verification of the Niger State workforce, a messenger at the state’s ministry of finance earned N265,000 monthly and a cleaner at General Hospital, Minna, earned N375,000 monthly, while no fewer than three permanent secretaries in the state’s civil service earned over N1.3 million monthly.

The ghost worker syndrome had been a trend which has sapped public funds since the regime of former President Olusegun Obasanjo up to the immediate past istration when former Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala held sway in the ministry.

In October 2014, the federal government uncovered a total of 60,000 ghost workers in federal establishments across the country, following the staff audit of the federal government ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) on the implementation of the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS).

Yesterday, Senate’s directive that the AGF, Malami, and the finance minister fastback action in prosecuting firms, banks and individuals linked to the 23,000 ghost worker scam was issued by the chairman, Committee on Finance, Senator John Enoh.

Enoh asked Mrs Adeosun to make sure that her ministry recovers all funds fraudulently received through the ghost workers’ s.

During her presentation, the minister lamented that the ghost worker scam had exposed the nation’s revenue system to very serious financial leakages.

She assured the Senate committee that the 23,000 ghost workers discovered in the Federal Civil Service would be handed over to Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), even as she added that banks and firms that connived with civil servants to pad the federal government payroll would also be prosecuted.

Adeosun said, “We have had a meeting on how we are going to clean them off. The process will be that we will suspend that person from the payroll pending the end of the investigation. As we speak now, we have about 23,000 that we need to investigate: those whom either the BVN is linked to multiple payments or the name on the BVN is not consistent with the name on our own payroll.

“If we are able to get everybody onto the BVN platform, we will be able to save a considerable amount of personnel cost. Not only will we remove those people from our payroll, but we will also be going after the banks involved to collect our money.

“So, some of the information that we are getting is how long has this person been on the pay roll, how much has he been getting.

In some getting the s are held by the same bank and in some cases all were opened on the same day. If we are able to prove that banks have colluded with people to pad our payroll, we are not only going to stop those payments but we are also going to try and recover our money”.

On what becomes the fate of defaulting MDAs, the minister said, “My job is to get them off our payroll; what happens from there on goes to the investigative

agencies. We will our files onto them and they will take a decision as to what sanctions they will take.

“Mine is that I do not want to pay them anymore, and whatever they have taken must come back; so we are going to hand our files on to EFCC and the relevant agencies.”

She explained to the committee how the use of the BVN policy helped the IPPIS in tracking down the ghost worker scam.

Adeosun said, “The IPPIS programme, funded by World Bank, started about five years ago and what it required was for every officer to come physically for biometric data capture. Over the five years, unfortunately, we have only been able to capture about 295,000 federal civil servants, which represent less than 20 per cent of the total personnel on the federal par roll.

“We realized that if we can get more people on IPPIS, our salary costs will come down and so we needed to get more people on IPPIS. So I looked critically at it with the director of IPPIS, and we decided to change the strategy; rather than getting the person to come physically – which has always been the problem, we will take the payroll that we have and the bank of everybody who is being paid.

“So, from that bank we will get the BVN; from the BVN we can get the biometric data, so that considerably accelerated the process of getting people onto IPPIS. I can tell you that within the last two months we have been on this programme, we have been able to enrol 320,000 onto IPPIS using BVN; that is, compared to 295,000 in five years.

“We are very confident with our programme, that we will now be able to get every federally paid civil servant onto IPPIS by June. We are aggressively chasing after June.”

When asked by the committee about the controversy that trailed the Treasury Single (TSA), the minister stated that it was not proper for the company managing the transfer to the TSA to have charged MDAs.

Noting that the firm should have been paid a reasonable amount by a central agency of government, she said, “The N25 billion that was allegedly paid out was actually incorrect; it was about N8 billion that was paid and it has been refunded because there was no basis for the deduction.

http://leadership.ng/news/500341/23000-ghost-workers-one-civil-servant-found-collecting-20-salaries

na wa oo

Na God go save this country

if the said civil servant is found guilty, he should serve the jail term for 20 people! shikena

happy doing it but if they see a man pick #10 the will ask for his head. there are people out there suffering and working without pay while others are eating more than they worked for.
in mama peace voice there is God oooooo

Is he a tax collector?

Jonathan's ideas...

Ohhh boy!

And so what ??
I need people like this to milk this country dry.

a man with 20 lives.

Kill that person.

The Jonathan istration tried in bringing up the BVN initiative. Kudos to them and the current istration in sustaining it.

GEJ till 2019. Yeye fowl

Nigerian needs iron hand to rule. That same man will go outside and say the government is corrupt. Me just sit down here dey watch.

This is serious

Okurin kan bi Ogun........

Why are these people forever advertising what they are 'going to do'?

Why can they seemingly never announce what they have done?

If someone is to be prosecuted then his/her name will be exposed by way of media reports of the court case.

after reading this thread,i dont know why lalasticlala's name keeps coming to my mind

I'm scared of this zoo of a country

Nigeria will be great again.

We certainly could not have continued the way we were going. No country could've sustained such systemic pilferage.

A culture of 'steal your own' had so deeply been engrained in us such that you needed a MAN to uproot the culture.

I can identify at 5 men running Nigeria at the moment
1. PMB...BABA NLA man.
2. PYO....he is madder than PMB
3..MAGU...his madness is deeper than magun sef. Werey madness.
4. DSS DIRECTOR. ..his own madness starts with the sight of sunlight.
5. El Rufai. ..unseen hand spicing the madness

Add your own jare.
But, I'm loving this madness already.

'STORY STORY EVERYDAY, WE ARE TIRED OF ALL THESE THRASH, NAME THE CRIMINAL AND STOP USING "ONE"'

People get mind sha. Now who will they blame for this? Everyday we keep shouting corruption on the part of our leaders, what are we ourselves doing to curb it from the grassroot level. I pray that everyone found wanting would face the full wrath of the law.

This was what we said yesterday but some of us thought the so called ghost workers are real people

Chei,unbelievable.Why are most naijas so heartless.God deliver this country.Please let their names be published and prosecuted.

Its well with Nigeria...

What's the meaning of this nonsense self how can one idiot no good ghost worker be receiving salary 20times in one month just imagine.... Cleaner getting N350K... Is the Cleaner cleaning Destinies or souls.. Whic kind of Messed up Country is this....

People are looking for work day and Night...some yeye people will be receiving salary 20times in one month....

God help us to help ourselves in this country.....
20times in one Month......

Is it possible to handover ghost to the efcc?

ochiora:
People get mind sha. Now who will they blame for this? Everyday we keep shouting corruption on the part of our leaders, what are we ourselves doing to curb it from the grassroot level. I pray that everyone found wanting would face the full wrath of the law.

Exactly the real thieves are not in government and not elected

Gradually moving Forward and Upward.
#SustainableGrowth. #ExposetheThieves. #DeleteCorruption.

Have u blamed GEJ today..... If NO_____Text Blame GEJ to 35056 for N50 only