There are more than two million people on the public sector payroll., and not all of them are actual people doing actual work.
How many public sector employees are fake? It’s a question we must confront if we are to bring down public sector spending, which accounts for about a third of state spending.
There’s enough anecdotal evidence to raise alarms, such as the 2 143 “suspicious” employees identified at the Passenger Rail Agency of SA (Prasa) in 2022, more than half of whom ‘resigned’ when these were investigated under Project Zivese (‘Reveal yourself’), an initiative aimed at determining the total number of employees at Prasa.
The Special Investigating Unit (SIU) has now been ordered by President Cyril Ramaphosa to investigate the issue of ghost workers at Prasa, among other offences – including fraudulent insurance claims and the irregular award of tenders for the supply of locomotives to Swifambo Rail Leasing.
ActionSA made this a pillar of its election campaign in 2024, saying the public sector was plagued with ghost employees – the worst offenders being Prasa, the Department of Education, and the South African Police Service (SAPS). This was based on research by the party.
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Finding the ghosts …
In 2024, the Auditor-General (AG) uncovered R6.4 million in salaries being paid to ghost workers at the Mpumalanga Department of Education. In 2002, the AG flagged more than 60 municipalities with payroll control issues, which suggests the ghost employee issue poisons every tier of government.
Msunduzi Municipality in KwaZulu-Natal identified 120 ghost workers in 2021 after 180 employees failed to appear for verification.
In 2023, the City of Tshwane found that nearly 500 of workers on its Expanded Public Works Programme could not be verified.
The monthly saving once these were eliminated from the payroll was R2 million. But that may not be the end of the problem, after recent claims by the Progressive Civic Congress that Tshwane has more ghost workers on its payroll than all other municipalities.
In May the Gauteng health department froze the salaries of 230 employees who could not be verified. This is a small fraction of the 85 000 employed by the department, but the campaign to root out the freeloaders is far from over.
ALSO READ: Gauteng health freezes 66 salaries in ghost employee crackdown
Salaries for 5 000 non-workers in Public Works
Minister of Public Works and Infrastructure Dean Macpherson launched a campaign in May to root out ghost workers, more than 5 000 of whom receive salaries but do not work for the department. The department oversees public sector infrastructure programmes and manages state assets, and wants to set the tone for the rest of government in eliminating fraud, including ghost workers.
“We have begun an important audit of our workforce in Public Works and Infrastructure where every employee will have to report to an office to physically verify themselves,” said Macpherson.
“This will help us ensure we only pay employees who are actually working to turn South Africa into a construction site.”
ALSO READ: R6 million in salaries paid to ghost workers in Mpumalanga
Cleaning house
The campaign against ghost workers appears to be getting the attention it deserves. Last week the Department of Public Service and Administration (DPSA), responsible for overseeing more than 1.2 million public sector workers, appeared before parliament to brief the Portfolio Committee on Public Service and Administration on steps it is taking to clean up the pervasive problem of ghost workers on the government payroll.
As Corruption Watch reports: “These non-existent employees draw salaries every month, creating extra pressure on the public purse that it doesn’t need. The committee expressed its view that ghost employees also hinder the hiring of new talent and more importantly, undermine public trust.”
In April, the Democratic Alliance laid charges of corruption against Minister of Human Settlements Thembi Simelane, who is alleged to have received more than R700 000 from Eskom while employed at Vitrovian, a consulting firm hired to suppress protests at Kusile Power Station during its construction.
Simelane, who denies the charges, is claimed to have overbilled Eskom for work performed by ghost employees.
The issue of ghost workers was also raised in the latest budget speech by Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana, promising that government would implement a “data-driven approach to detecting payroll irregularities [which] will replace the more costly method of using censuses”.
This will involve cross-referencing administrative datasets to identify ghost workers and other anomalies across government departments.
ALSO READ: National government exorcises Mangaung’s ghost workers, corruption
Parliament wants naming and shaming
Parliament’s Portfolio Committee wants ghost employees and officials involved in loading them onto the payroll system to be named and shamed and to face disciplinary action.
Its patience with lax HR controls appears to be wearing thin, with the DPSA berated over “weaknesses in current payroll and human resource management systems in the public sector, which are still primarily paper-based, with internal registers lacking physical or biometric verification”.
Perhaps most frustrating for the committee is the lack of statistics on the number of ghost employees.
What’s needed are hard numbers, names, locations and the financial impact of this fraud.
“The remarks and frustrations voiced by members reflect the urgency and seriousness of the issue, and the DPSA must take them seriously,” said committee chair Jan de Villiers, adding that the credibility of parliamentary oversight depends on results and cannot just be talk shops.
What parliament wants is to see that action is being taken against errant officials, including disciplinary and criminal accountability where appropriate.
The DPSA says it will conduct a comprehensive audit of the Personnel and Salary (Persal) system, which is used by departments and government entities to capture administrative records for every person appointed. This payroll system requires input from several users with different responsibilities, supposedly making it harder to process ghost salaries. The only way this could be achieved is where all parties are in collusion.
ALSO READ: ‘It’s a scam’: Mbalula says Prasa’s ghost workers saga to be referred for criminal investigations
Windfall for the state purse if addressed
Based on the available evidence, there are tens of thousands of ghost workers across the public sector, costing billions of rands a year.
The elimination of ghost workers at Prasa alone saved it R200 million.
So it’s safe to say that a thorough verification of public sector employees will yield a handsome windfall for the fiscus.
This has been a key focus of the US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed until recently by Elon Musk, which by some reports has identified more than 100 000 ghost employees.
The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners has reported that ghost employees account for about 8% occupational fraud cases worldwide.
Considering the admitted laxity of controls in SA’s public sector, we can assume the local figure is way higher than this. Given the expected public wage bill of close to R800 billion in the current fiscal year, which does not include the roughly R85 billion a year in salaries paid to employees of state-owned companies, ridding the country of moochers would be a huge relief to the fiscus.
This article was republished from Moneyweb. Read the original here.
