Alleged 23,000 Ghost Workers: FG Goes After Banks to Recover Monies.

The Federal Government had disclosed plans to go after banks to recover all monies paid to the 23,000 ghost workers registered on the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS).

The Minister of Finance Kemi Adeosun disclosed while briefing the Senate Committee on Finance that the ministry was still conducting investigations.

She explained that payment of the 23,000 suspected workers would be suspended for one month to allow investigations to be completed.

Adeosun said upon conclusion of the investigation, any bank found guilty would be made to refund all the money paid through them so far.

The Minister added that the discovery of the ghost workers was due to the registration of over 320,000 personnel on the IPPIS platform using their BVN numbers.

"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 the 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 getting the accounts 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,” she said.

The minister added that the MDAs who are also found guilty would not be ignored but would be handed over to the relevant agencies of government for further investigation and prosecution.

She said that the work of the ministry was to uncover the fraud and recover its money but that the work of criminal prosecution of individuals or banks involved.

The minister explained that in five years, the IPPIS was only able to register 295 workers but with the BVN registration, the ministry planned to register all workers by June end.

She added that the removal of all fake workers will greatly reduce the personnel burden on the Federal Government, hence the reduction of personnel cost in 2016 by about N100 billion.

"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 we decided to change the strategy, rather than getting the person to come physically 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 considerably accelerates the process of getting people unto IPPIS.

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.

The Chairman of the Committee Sen. John Eno in his remarks commended  the ministry and charged them to ensure full investigation and sanction for all found guilty.