FG Vows to Punish Banks Which Connive with Ghost Workers

To hand over 23,000 names to EFCC

Omololu Ogunmade

The federal government yesterday pledged to punish banks found to have illegally increased its wage bill by conniving with ghost workers to open salary accounts for them.

The government said it would not only recover all that it had lost to the scam but would simultaneously hand over 23,000 names it had so far discovered through its Integrated Payment and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) and Bank Verification Number (BVN) to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) for prosecution.

Making this disclosure during the budget defence of her ministry, Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, said the advent of BVN had helped to facilitate the effectiveness of IPPIS.

She further disclosed that whereas only 295,000 civil servants were captured through IPPIS in five years, the application of BVN to the system had captured as many as 320,000 workers in just three months.

According to her, the continuous discovery of ghost workers in the civil service would save the nation of a huge sum of money, assuring that by June this year, all ghost workers would have been wiped out and every worker made IPPIS’ compliant.

“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 had 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 realised 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 account of everybody who is being paid. So, from that bank account, we will get the BVN; from the BVN, we can get the biometric data so that had considerably accelerated the process of getting people eunto IPPIS.

“I can tell you that within the last two months that we have been on this programme, we have been able to enroll 320,000 onto IPPIS using BVN, 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,” she said.

Furthermore, Adeosun said the combination of BVN with IPPIS had brought about mind boggling revelations including the multiple appearances of some persons on federal government’s payroll.

She further disclosed that anyone discovered by the applications would immediately have his or name expunged from the payroll and investigation into his personal details taking off immediately. While promising that all the sums paid to the person so far would be recovered, she added that investigation of suspects would be concluded within 30 days.

The initiative was commended by the committee chairman who also advised the minister to ensure that the ministry does not only recover the money but to as well ensure that culprits are handed to anti-graft agencies for due punishment.