FG eliminates ghost workers, saves N119bn

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
implementationcommittee 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
revenueto the coffers of the Federal Government as directed, the
minister revealedthat 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
theirhigh 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.