Finance minister, Kemi Adeosun, on Thursday, vowed to investigate 23,000 federal civil servants who had multiple Bank Verification Numbers (BVNs)
Adeosun, who appeared before the Senate Committee on Finance to defend the ministry’s budget, said the revelation came out following efforts to synchronise the IPPIS with the BVNs adding that most of the salary accounts traced through BVN are held with the same bank and opened the same day.
Adeosun also revealed that 320,000 federal civil servants had been captured in the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS) in the last three months in contrast to 295,000 captured in five years.
The minister, who vowed that she would leave no stone unturned in ensuring that the money was recovered, said some civil servants appeared as ghost workers, citing an instance where a particular civil servant collected salaries for 20 workers under various pseudonyms.
Going forward, Adeosun said not only would the payments be recovered, the culprits would be handed over to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and other investigating agencies for prosecution.
She expressed optimism that by June this year, all federal employees would have been captured in the IPPIS programme, saying this would clean up the issue of ghost workers in the federal civil service.
“We have identified that there are people who appear on our payroll multiple times. Because as you know, BVN links all the accounts of one person. So, we are seeing in some payrolls 20 people with the same BVN,” she said.
“As we speak, we have about 23,000 that we need to investigate for various reasons. Either the BVN is linked to multiple payments or the name on the BVN account is not consistent with the name on our payroll.”
The IPPIS, a World Bank funded programme, which started five years ago, aims at creating a centralized database system for Nigerian Public Service with single, accurate source of information about Federal Government employees.
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) through the Banker’ Committee and in collaboration with all banks in Nigeria on February 14, 2014 launched a centralized biometric identification system for the banking industry tagged Bank Verification Number (BVN).
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