Graphic: John McCann/M&G
Creating one ghost employee on the public payroll requires the collusion of at least three officials, the chairperson of parliament’s portfolio committee on public service and administration said on Monday.
Jan de Villiers also said that the era of treating ghost workers as a clerical irregularity was over.
“This is not merely a payroll anomaly. It is a deliberate and orchestrated form of systemic corruption,” he said at a media briefing by chairpersons of the governance cluster in the National Assembly. “It is organised crime within the state.”
The briefing follows a renewed government focus on eliminating waste and corruption in the public sector wage bill, triggered by Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana’s budget speech last month.
Godongwana announced a sweeping expenditure review of more than R300 billion in government spending since 2013, using a data-driven strategy to root out inefficiencies, including ghost employees.
De Villiers said the portfolio committee, acting on this directive, convened on 28 May to interrogate the pervasive and corrosive problem of ghost workers. Its conclusion was that the issue was systemic, criminal and far more widespread than previously acknowledged.
“The department of public service and administration confirmed before parliament that ghost workers are present across all three spheres of government — national, provincial and municipal. They are also embedded in state-owned entities and agencies,” De Villiers said.
Among the examples cited were 230 unverifiable employees whose salaries were frozen by the Gauteng department of health in May, and R6.4 million in salaries paid to ghost workers in the Mpumalanga department of education, which was uncovered by the auditor general.
During a September 2024 hearing, the standing committee on public accounts was briefed by the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) on the discovery of 1 277 ghost employees in the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa’s (Prasa) system.
According to the SIU, Prasa had been losing about R20 million a month in fraudulent salaries. The majority of the agency’s ghost workers were reportedly former employees who had never been removed from the system. This was not an error of omission. The Ziveze Project, which uncovered the fraud, suggested that payroll manipulation had become institutional practice.
These were not isolated incidents, De Villiers warned. “The numbers are staggering. They are not anomalies. They are symptoms of a system that needs structural intervention.”
The creation of a ghost employee required collusion, De Villiers said. “At least three officials need to work together to insert a ghost worker into the payroll system. This means we are dealing not with random lapses in judgment, but embedded criminal syndicates.”
Although efforts were under way to identify and remove ghost employees through integrated audits between the department and the treasury, De Villiers said more was required.
“A data audit alone is not enough. Every person drawing a public salary must be verified in person and through biometric identification. The public has the right to know the names on the payroll correspond to individuals who really exist and who serve the public,” he said.
“Currently, the three tier authentication system used to validate employee status is open to manipulation. Internal controls have failed. Oversight has been diluted. The opportunity for fraud persists because the tools needed to prevent it have not been enforced, and worse, have been exploited by those meant to protect them.”
Departments must take the lead in developing a formalised framework to ensure protection and prevention, and regular audits searching for ghost employees should be carried out, he said.
The framework will mandate formal, periodic payroll audits and reconciliation, in person verification and biometric registration, centralised authorisation of appointments and terminations and digital certification of employee attendance and performance.
The committee would also call on the auditor general to expand its scope, said De Villiers, requiring that all department and entity audits include a verification of whether internal ghost employees audits have been conducted and whether they were done credibly.
“We will push for disciplinary and criminal action to follow every detection of ghost workers. Names must be handed over to the SIU, the Hawks and the South African Police Service. Fraudsters must not be shielded by departmental silence or internal collusion,” he said.
Consequences of inaction were “grave”, he added.
“Every ghost worker represents a post that could have been filled by a qualified graduate, a dedicated nurse, a teacher at a rural school, or a social worker supporting the vulnerable. Every fraudulent salary paid is a step backwards in the fight for a professional, ethical and responsive, responsive state.
“In light of this, the portfolio committee cannot and will not stand idle. Among our priorities in the seventh parliament is to push for the cleanup of the PERSAL system, which remains the foundation of the human resources and vital records in the public sector.”
Incomplete performance reviews, poor attendance tracking, and manual leave registers must become early warning indicators, and should trigger automatic investigations.
Asked by journalists about the departments most affected by ghost workers, De Villiers said the issue was impossible to localise.
“Every single department, agency, level of government, and state-owned enterprise probably has ghost workers,” he said.
But, he added, positions that involved out-of-office work were more easily exploited.
He said the lack of uniformity in how public servants were employed — each department using its own HR processes without central oversight — was part of the problem.
“We need a national approach, led jointly by DPSA [department of public service and administration] and treasury, and involving the auditor general, Cogta [department of cooperative governance and traditional affairs] and law enforcement.”
The departments would reconvene in the third quarter of 2025 to review progress, scope, preliminary findings, and enforcement mechanisms, De Villiers said. “This is not going to be another talk shop.”