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BVN has helped govt weed ghost workers, Adeosun says

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11,000 more Ghost Workers uncovered -Adeosun

The Bank Verification Number (BVN), an initiative of the Central Bank of Nigeria, is not an effort in futility after all, as the policy has helped the federal government to weed out ghost workers from its payrolls.

A statement from the Ministry of Finance, signed by the Finance Minister, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, on Tuesday, said it was gratifying to note that the government had successfully completed a pilot programme which used BVN details to check for ghost workers and identify duplicate and other irregular entries on the payroll.

In the statement, which reads in part: “The BVN provides a pool of reliable data against which records held on the Federal Government’s payroll will be cross checked to identify inconsistencies, including duplicate payments, payments to dormant accounts, multiple payments to a single account holder, non-matching of data provided, among others.”

She also assured that “genuine staff have nothing to be concerned about but those who are collecting multiple salaries and those engaged in any type of payroll fraud are guaranteed to be caught out.”

Justifying the need for the BVN, Adeosun said: “Since the advent of BVN, we have seen a trend of such requests for transfer from commercial bank accounts to non BVN accounts. Accordingly, we plan to undertake a detailed review of all persons who have requested such transfers in the last 12 months.”

The Ministry of Finance, she hinted, is also working closely with NIBSS to finalise plans to roll out BVN to capture non-BVN bank institutions with a significant number of Federal Government salary accounts.

The pilot project, the statement noted, was initiated as a solution to the slow pace of progress being encountered in the enrollment of staff on the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS).

According to the minister, “the strategy of using BVN rather than requiring the physical presence of each member of staff has significantly simplified and accelerated the progress of the project and at a lower cost than previously incurred.”

She added that “to date, despite over five years since the initiation of the project, just 20% of public employees have actually been enrolled onto IPPIS due to a variety of reasons. As part of our public financial management reforms, we are committed to scrutinizing our largest single expense item. Personnel related costs account for over 40% of government expenditure and must be prudently managed to ensure the validity of every payment. We are therefore determined that everyone who collects a salary from the federal purse is on the IPPIS system.”

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