The Finance minister, Kemi Adeosun has revealed how one civil servant alone was collecting 20 salaries every month and 23,000 ghost workers in the Federal Civil Service were discovered, with the help of the Biometric Verification Number (BVN) policy,
Adeosun disclosed during a budget defence session by the Federal Ministry of Finance before the committee.
She told the Senate Committee on Finance that the 23,000 ghost workers discovered would be handed over to EFCC for prosecution alongside all individuals, firms and banks that aided the inclusion of the ghost workers on federal government’s payroll.
The adoption of BVN in processing salary payments by the federal government had stunningly thrown up no fewer than 23,000 ghost names on its payroll, a development that raised concerns about the huge amount of monies that may have been stolen from the nation’s coffers through such leakages in the federal civil service.
“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,” Adeosun said.
