Senate backs sanction for 23, 000 ghost workers

The Senate on Thursday sanctioned the prosecution of top civil servants over the discovery of 23, 000 ghost workers on government payroll reportedly uncovered during the implementation of the Bank Verification Number (BVN) in some Ministries, Department and Agencies recently.

The Chairman, Senate Committee on Finance, Senator John Enoh, gave this hint during the budget defence session with the Ministry of Finance.

Addressing the Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, Enoh impressed on the ministry the need to ensure that funds fraudulently received through the scam are recovered.

Expectedly, Mrs. Adeosun assured that perpetrators of the scam and their collaborators in the banks would not escape punishment.

The Minister said the ghost workers were discovered through the adoption of the Personnel Payroll Information System and Bank Verification Number platforms.

Adeosun said: “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 accounts of that person, so we are seeing in our payroll, 20 names to one BVN number.

“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 investigation. We will try as much as possible to conclude that investigation within 30 days so that we do not suffer innocent people, but we really need to clean our payroll. We have about 23,000 that we need to investigate; those whom either the BVN is linked to multiple payment or the name on the BVN account is not consistent with the name on our own payroll.

“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 had been getting. In some cases, the accounts are held by the same bank and whike in some other cases, all were opened on the same day”.

She also disclosed that the ministry would have registered the entire federal workforce on the BVN platform by the end of June.

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