Minister of Finance, Mrs Kemi Adeosun, said the ministry had successfully completed a pilot programme which used Bank Verification Number (BVN) details to check for ghost workers.
This is contained in a statement on Tuesday in Abuja by the ministry’s Director of Press, Mr Marshall Gundu.
The statement said the programme was also to identify duplicate and other irregular entries on the payroll.
It said that more than 30 million biometric and personal data records of civil servants had been captured using the BVN.
The minister said in the statement that the BVN had helped in accelerating the enrollment of staff on the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS).
It said the strategy of using BVN, rather than requiring physical presence of staff, had significantly simplified and accelerated the progress of the project at a lower cost than previously incurred.
“This will accelerate the pace of enrollment on IPPIS as well as identify anomalies which can be flagged for further investigation and review.
“The BVN provides a pool of reliable data to cross check and identify inconsistencies on the record of Federal Government’s payroll.
“These inconsistencies include duplicate payments, payments to dormant accounts, multiple payments to a single account holder, non-matching of data provided, among others,’’ the statement said.
According to the statement, genuine staff has nothing to be concerned about but those who are collecting multiple salaries and engaging in any type of payroll fraud are guaranteed to be caught.
The pilot project was initiated as a solution to the slow pace of progress being encountered in the enrollment of staff on IPPIS, the statement said.
“To date, despite over five years since initiation of the project, just 20 per cent 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 scrutinising our largest single expense item.
“Personnel related costs account for over 40 per cent 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. ”
The statement said the ministry had built in controls to counteract those seeking to transfer their salary receiving accounts to micro-finance, mortgage bank and other non BVN accounts in order to evade detection.
“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 is also working to roll out BVN to capture non-BVN bank institutions with a significant number of Federal Government salary accounts,’’ it said.
The statement said that the ministry had set up a “Continuous Audit” team with the sole function of undertaking detailed, programmed audits on payroll.
“The team is to be based in the Office of the Minister and is to be headed by the Director of Funds, Mr Mohammed Dikwa, in the Office of the Accountant General.
“The remit of the team will be to undertake programmed risk based audits of the payroll to strengthen the controls framework.
“The Federal Government anticipates to save billions of naira as a result of these initiatives, ‘’ the statement said.
