New online verification platform to exorcise ghost workers in public sector

The Department of Home Affairs (DHA) says it has developed a new real-time biometric verification system to help root out ghost workers, which are reckoned to cost the South African taxpayer R3.9 billion a year.

These are workers who are paid a salary but do no work – typically due to collusion between public sector officials who add fictitious employees to payroll systems, duplicate entries, or administrative neglect.

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The new platform – designed to detect ghost employees, duplicate identities and payroll fraud – will go live on 15 June.

The biometric verification system will be integrated with the National Population Register, with identity documents, fingerprints and facial images being matched against the register.

The biometric data will include “liveness” testing to help flush out fraud.

“If used consistently, this platform has the power to save South African taxpayers billions of rands by leveraging the power of enhanced biometric systems to identify ghost employees and others involved in defrauding government payrolls,” said Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber at the platform’s announcement this week.

‘High-risk’ cases flagged 

The new online platform aligns with National Treasury’s Targeted and Responsible Savings (Tars) programme, aimed at slashing wasteful and fraudulent expenditure.

National Treasury has flagged thousands of high-risk ghost worker cases as part of Tars.

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The new DHA tool will allow departments to verify employees in real time, making the crackdown on ghost workers far more effective and systematic.

The public sector wage bill for the current fiscal year is expected to top R850 billion, around a third of total government spending, and the largest line item in the budget.

Last year, Treasury launched a data-driven audit of ghost employees and payment irregularities across national and provincial departments, where salaries account for more than 60% of expenditure.

Using the state Persal payroll system as a base, Treasury cross-checked data with the SA Revenue Service (Sars), the DHA, and other institutions to identify ghost employees, duplicate IDs, multiple salaries and unauthorised allowances.

Read: Slight relief for overburdened individual taxpayers

“This is exactly the type of practical, technology-driven intervention that the committee has been calling for. We have been vocal in stating that ghost workers are not simply an administrative irregularity,” says Jan de Villiers, chair of the Portfolio Committee on Public Service and Administration.

“They represent theft from the public purse, undermine the credibility of the public service, and rob South Africans of resources that should be used for service delivery.”

Trade union group Cosatu says ghost posts are “a particularly grotesque form of state capture and corruption.

“Not only are they tantamount to the theft of workers’ hard-earned taxes, but they place unbearable burdens upon already overstretched nurses, doctors, teachers, police officers and other frontline staff struggling to provide public services to working-class communities, whilst battling high vacancy rates and painful austerity budget cuts.”

Ghost workers found across government

It remains unknown how many ghost workers are currently on the public sector payroll, although there have been several recent efforts to root them out:

• Dean Macpherson launched a campaign in May 2025 to eliminate ghost workers in the Department of Public Works and Infrastructure, where more than 5 000 were receiving salaries without working for the department.
• In 2024, the Auditor-General uncovered R6.4 million in fraudulent salary payments to ghost workers in the Mpumalanga Department of Education. Their removal from the payroll reportedly resulted in monthly savings of R2 million.
• In 2021, Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa) launched Project Ziveze to verify its payroll, identifying around 3 000 potential ghost workers out of 17 268 recorded employees.
• In May 2025, the Gauteng Department of Health froze the salaries of 230 employees who could not be verified. This is a small fraction of its 85 000-strong workforce, indicating widespread vulnerabilities.
• The Department of Public Service and Administration (DPSA) has acknowledged that ghost workers exist across all tiers of government – national, provincial, and local – as well as within state-owned enterprises, pointing to a widespread systemic issue.

As Moneyweb previously reported, 4 232 government employees were flagged as “high risk” as part of an ongoing ghost worker audit across the civil service.

Treasury is determined to manage public sector wage spending and believes up to 30 000 employees will opt for early retirement at age 55.

This could trim R2.6 billion in wage costs in the current fiscal year, though the costs of the early retirement programme is budgeted at R5.5 billion over the medium term.

Pressure to modernise systems

The Portfolio Committee on Public Service and Administration has urged reform of government’s payroll and human resource management systems, which are still largely paper-based and fragmented, and has highlighted the need to modernise identity systems.

The new verification platform will help address the vulnerabilities of the manual system that rely on physical verification methods.

De Villiers says consequences must follow where ghost employees are identified.

“South Africans suffer from corruption fatigue. The public is growing weary of hearing about fraud and corruption without seeing any consequences.

“They have the right to see concrete outcomes such as ghost employees removed from the system, perpetrators prosecuted and jailed and public money safeguarded for service delivery.”

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