Days of the undead: Treasury’s ghost staff headache  

Weak service delivery has for years haunted many corners of the public sector, leaving taxpayers in, well, low spirits. Making things infinitely worse are the thousands of “ghost workers” collecting salaries for nothing.  

That’s why National Treasury, with sidekicks the South African Revenue Service and home affairs, has now started busting this costly racket. 

So far, it has found 8,854 cases “where individuals receiving payments from multiple departments were inactive employees or had bank account anomalies”, according to the mid-term budget policy statement, released on Wednesday. 

Inactivity obviously calls for some, ahem, exorcism. Yet it is still a staggering indictment that enough people to fill a mid-sized sports stadium were being paid without proof of their existence. 

All of these staff are to be found on Persal, the public service payroll platform. With some 1.3-million civil servants on the books, salary payments are a fount of cash. 

“Ghost workers,” notes Treasury, “are individuals who are listed on the payroll but do not perform the duties associated with their position.” This includes “individuals who have left the public service or who are deceased”.

“The ghost worker identification process will also identify individuals appearing on multiple government systems,” continues the document, adding that the digging is being done on national as well as provincial level. 

For example, National Treasury officials are working with their counterparts in the Eastern Cape to implement ghost worker detection within the provincial health department. And, more broadly, there is collaboration with the department of home affairs to identify officials without valid ID numbers and detect duplicate photo identities using biometric data.  

There is some low-tech checking happening too. Education, where more than half the budgeted amount ends up being spent on salaries, is one of the more sobering of case studies when it comes to taxpayers getting very little bang for their buck. Here, the Education Labour Relations Council is undertaking physical verification of teacher and learner numbers across all provinces. 

Ghost teachers are not a new phenomenon, however. Anyone who’s bunked a class or two knows it probably only costs you a Lunch Bar to have a mate say “present!” when your name is called. Hopefully the council’s roll call is done with more rigour. 

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