The Federal Government will to go after commercial banks to recover all monies paid to over 23,000 ghost workers registered on the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS), says Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun. The minister disclosed this yesterday while briefing the Senate Committee on Finance in Abuja, She said the government was still investigating to enable it take a final decision on the matter.
She explained that payment of the 23,000 non-existent workers would be suspended for one month to allow investigations to be completed. She said upon conclusion of the investigation, any bank found guilty would be made to refund all the monies paid through them so far.
The minister said the discovery of the ghost workers was due to the registration of over 320,000 personnel on the IPPIS platform using their Bank Verification Numbers (BVN).
Adeosun said: “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 investigation within 30 days so that we do not punish 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 payroll, how much has he 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,” Adeosun said.
The minister noted that the Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) which are also found guilty would not be ignored but be handed over to the relevant agencies of government for further investigation and prosecution.
She said the ministry will uncover the fraud and recover its money.
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 30, this year.
Adeosun said 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.
Chairman of the Committee, Senator John Eno, commended the ministry and charged them to ensure full investigation and sanction for all found guilty.
