Nigeria's Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, the ICPC, has said that the Nigeria Police Force has the highest number of suspected ghost workers among federal institutions. According to the commission's chairman, Musa Adamu Aliyu, the finding emerged from a payroll verification exercise that the ICPC carried out across several federal government institutions in an effort to establish who is genuinely on the public payroll.
The scale of the exercise was considerable. The commission says that a total of 908 suspected ghost workers were discovered in at least 50 ministries, departments and agencies of the federal government. The term refers to names that appear on official payrolls and draw salaries even though they do not correspond to genuine, existing members of staff, making them a persistent drain on public funds.
Alongside the number of fake entries, the ICPC also pointed to the money involved. About 942 million naira has been recovered in the course of the verification, sums that had allegedly been paid out as fraudulent salaries to these non-existent workers. The recovery gives a concrete measure of how much public money had been leaving the treasury through the padded payrolls.
Beyond the police, the commission set out how the suspected ghost workers were spread across other parts of the federal government. The Federal Ministry of Electricity and the Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment were each found to have 17 suspected fake workers. The Federal Ministry of Health recorded 15, while the Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation accounted for 12.
The identification of the Nigeria Police Force as the institution with the highest number of suspected ghost workers is significant given the size and reach of the force. The commission's account frames the police alongside the other affected ministries and offices as part of a wider pattern of irregular entries that the payroll verification set out to expose across the federal system.
The disclosure comes out of the ICPC's payroll verification drive, which forms part of broader efforts to sanitise the federal payroll and to curb the payment of salaries to workers who cannot be accounted for. By naming the institutions involved and quantifying both the number of suspected ghost workers and the money recovered, the commission has put a figure on a problem that has long been cited as a source of leakage in public spending.