The federal government has successfully enrolled about 320,000 federal workers into its innovative salary processing system after it successfully flushed out over 60,000 ghost workers from its payroll. The new salary system was introduced to check the bulging and crooked public expenditure overhead which averaged about N360 billion yearly until 2015.
This renewed effort at reforming the salary system has been hailed as a bold fresh step by analysts who say the federal government is showing it is determined to build a whole new value and culture of fiscal discipline amidst the President Mohammadu Buhari’s fight against corruption.
The new salary system is the initiative of the finance ministry under the leadership of Kemi Adeosun, the finance minister who is pushing for a renewed drive towards enlarging non-oil revenues.
Much of her work has been dedicated towards fine-tuning existing systems like the Integrated Personnel Payroll Information System (IPPIS), Treasury Single Account (TSA), and Government Integrated Financial Management Information System (GIFMIS) to enable them to better plug systemic leakages in the government’s financial management system.
The ministry, in a statement made available to pressmen, noted that Kemi Adeosun, the finance minister, was passionately committed to making these happen in a manner that is evident in the way she has spoken about them in public.
Marshall Gundu, director of press at the ministry, who signed the statement, said the minister appeared unfazed by the enormity of the challenges and exuded intense positive energy and optimism about the financial prospects of the country and had a measured dose of patriotic anger to change things.
The minister had revealed, during a meeting with Senate Committee on Finance recently, that about 23,000 ghost workers had been discovered in the federal civil service and attributed that to the novel and creative idea that linked the Integrated Personnel Payroll Information System (IPPIS) and Bank Verification Number (BVN) platforms which helped in exposing the massive fraud being perpetrated by civil servants.
She disclosed further that by using the BVN alongside the IPPIS database, it was possible to identify multiple accounts that were tied to individual BVNs, citing an instance where about 20 names were linked to one BVN.
She assured that after investigations, those found culpable would be prosecuted, adding that banks that would be found to have connived and knowingly facilitated the fraud would be compelled to refund the monies to the federal purse.
