Nigeria Government Eliminates Ghost workers,save N119billion

The Federal Government has
saved about N119 billion from ghost
workers through the Integrated Payroll
and Personnel Information System, IPPIS.

The Coordinating Minister for the Economy
and Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-
Iweala, disclosed this while inaugurating
the implementation committee of the
system in Abuja, yesterday
She said the implementation of the IPPIS
will “enhance efficient personnel cost
planning and budgeting as personnel cost
will be based on actual verified numbers
and not estimates”.

Under the IPPIS, workers’ salaries are paid
centrally from the Office of the Accountant-
General of the Federation, AGF, into
individual workers’ accounts, as opposed
to the former practice under which
estimated staff salaries were released to
MDAs and the organisations paid the
individual workers.

That system gave room to a large army of
ghost workers in the MDAs such that a total
of 46, 000 names on the payroll,
representing close to one out of three
workers in the organisations so far
covered were ghost workers
According to Dr. Okonjo-Iewala, 215
Ministries, Departments and Agencies,
MDAs, with a total staff strength of 153,
019 have been captured on the IPPIS.
Under the system, each Federal
Government staff’s biometric data is
captured to enable the implementation
officers determine who really is a staff,
while names whose bearers fail to present
themselves for verification are considered
those being used by pay officers to
defraud the government.

The minister said the new committee with
the Minister of State for Finance, Dr. Yarima
Ngama, as Chairman would fast-track the
process of bringing the remaining 321
federal MDAs on the system, with the hope
that the problem of ghost workers would
be addressed effectively at the federal
level.

Dr. Okonjo-Iweala also charged the Ngama-
led committee to speed up work on the
Government Integrated Financial
Management and Information System,
GIFMIS, under which Federal Government
acquisition, allocation, utilization and
conservation of public financial resources
is automated and integrated.

She disclosed that 58 per cent of the
budget was already being executed
through GIFMIS, adding that the volume of
government activities captured under the
system would have risen to 79 per cent by
the end of the third quarter.
On the refusal of some MDAs to remit 25
per cent of their gross revenue to the
coffers of the Federal Government as
directed, the minister revealed that her
team has recovered about N34 billion out
of the outstanding N58 billion.
She insisted that further measures were
being adopted to ensure the recovery of
their funds .

The AGF, Mr. Jonah Otunla, disclosed that
until the commencement of the GIFMIS in
April last year, there was a preponderance
of MDAs accounts across various banks in
the country and that managing Federal
Government’s finances was very difficult.
According to him, there were situations
where government was even borrowing
its own money from the system, especially
as there was a disparity in terms of idle
funds of low spending MDAs as opposed to
their high spending counterparts.

He said some government officials were
reluctant to buy into the new system of
administering government funds from a
central focal point but that there was no
going back on the initiative which has
reduced government’s borrowing from
about N154 billion to only N20 billion.
Other members of the committee were:
Messrs Otunla, Faouk Gumel, Bizmark
Rewane, Tunde Kehinde of duniya.com and
Angela Adeboye.

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