A plan by the government to roll out a unified payroll system to weed out ghost workers will begin at the Ministry of Education, reforms expected to save taxpayers billions of shillings stolen through an exaggerated wage bill.

National Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi said the ministry has been plagued by cases of dead teachers remaining on the payroll for years, continuing to siphon the country’s resources.

The CS said they are working on rolling out the system because of fears of widespread cases of ghost workers across different ministries, departments and agencies in the country.

He said Kenya needs a system that will root out and eliminate these ghost workers, who are denying us the resources we need for development.

Ghost workers are non-existent employees who are listed on payrolls, resulting in substantial financial losses due to fraudulent salary payments.

Kenya has a problem of ghost workers paid hundreds of millions of shillings thereby inflating the wage bill.

A 2007 investigation by the defunct Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission into the operations of the Teachers Service Commission discovered that while there were officially 230,000 teachers on the payroll, only 198,000 of them could be accounted for.

Accordingly, the government could have been paying millions of shillings to 32,000 “ghost teachers” every month.

Mr Mbadi, a former Suba South MP, said that when he was the chairperson, he encountered an instance where some teachers remained on the payroll for many years, even after they were dead.

“We will start by targeting the Ministry of Education, where we have the biggest wage bill, the Teachers Service Commission and the others to eliminate them,” said CS Mbadi.

“If dead teachers can remain on the payroll, then chances are that non-existent teachers could also find their way on,” he added.

He argued that the system is needed, alluding to a discussion with the United Nations Development Programme, which has conducted research in some other countries, revealing how an audit of the payroll of a certain country discovered that 17 percent of the workers who were on the payroll were ghost workers.

“I suspect that Kenya could even be worse. We are working on rolling out a unified payroll system because we have our fears too,” he said.

## Radical measures

The development follows a Cabinet meeting in September which resolved to implement radical measures aimed at weeding out ghost workers in government.

The meeting, chaired by President William Ruto, acknowledged that several government offices are flooded with ghost workers who continue to receive millions of taxpayers’ money in salaries and allowances.

Subsequently, the Cabinet approved the implementation of a unified personnel identification system to eradicate 'ghost worker' payroll fraud across all levels of government.

President Ruto said the new identification system will be implemented across all arms of government, including constitutional offices.

The system is designed to ensure that only qualified individuals are employed in public service, reducing instances of payroll fraud.

The decision followed a damning report by the Public Service Commission (PSC) covering the fiscal year ending June 30, 2023, which established that there were 19,467 ghost workers in the national government, including 12,535 in ministries and their departments, 4,558 in State corporations, and 2,287 in public universities.

The report recommended that all public organisations develop human resource management and development plans by June 30, 2024.

Subsequently, the government has developed a human resource information system to manage civil servants.

The system, Kenya Human Resource Information System (KHRIS), developed with assistance from the World Bank, will have a payroll module that will manage salaries for civil servants.

All state departments are expected to have in place the new system by June 30, 2025. The system will have about eight modules across the human resource function, including the establishment module, which will inform how many officers a state department is supposed to have.

It will also have a module on pensions to make payment seamless. The payroll module has been finalised awaiting links to the Integrated Financial Management Information System, iTax and Central Bank of Kenya internet banking.

Ghost workers’ menace is also prevalent in counties where billions of taxpayers’ money is pumped out annually to pay the non-existent employees who have been fraudulently placed on the payroll systems of most of the county governments.

Numerous county governments have reported cases of ghost workers, leading to investigations and audits to clean up payrolls.

Of the counties that have made their staff audit findings public during the financial year ending June 30, 2022, Kiambu (2,299) and West Pokot (2,300) had the highest number of non-existent workers.

Murang’a revealed it had lost Sh977.8 million to ghost workers, followed by Nyandarua (Sh404.4 million), Migori (Sh300 million) and Vihiga (Sh130.7 million). Busia County revealed that it had found 116 non-existent workers, but did not state how much the theft costs taxpayers. In total, the eight counties had 5,953 ghost workers.

Last year, the Kisii County government revealed the existence of 1,314 ghost workers following an audit by the Institute of Human Resource Management (IHRM).

An audit by the Auditor-General revealed that Nyamira County had 736 ghost workers on its payroll in the financial year ending June 30, 2019.

In 2022, a human resource audit of the Lamu County government showed the presence of at least 112 ghost workers on the county’s payroll for years.

A report by the Vihiga County Public Service Board showed about 426 employees could not be traced at their duty stations during the audit.