Mail & Guardian reports that the chairperson of parliament’s portfolio committee on public service and administration pointed out on Monday that creating one ghost employee on the public payroll required the collusion of at least three officials.

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. It is organised crime within the state,” he said at a media briefing by chairpersons of the governance cluster in the National Assembly. The briefing followed 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 use of 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. 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.

• Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Des Erasmus at Mail & Guardian
• Read too, ‘Real people drawing fraudulent salaries’ – crackdown looms on public sector ghost employees, at Daily Maverick
• And also, Ghost workers are a 'deliberate and orchestrated form of systemic corruption', at IOL News

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