Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Public Service and Administration, Jan de Villiers said that the persistent and corrosive problem of ghost workers in the public sector is not merely a payroll anomaly, but a “deliberate and orchestrated form of systemic corruption”.
De Villiers was part of the three chairpersons of the parliamentary Governance Cluster Oversight committees who held a briefing as part of the 7th Parliament’s regular Committee Cluster Media Engagement programme on Monday.
He said that the true scope of ghost workers is not truly known, and an investigation into this problem is part of a joint audit now underway between the Department of Public Service and Administration and the National Treasury.
When tabling his budget, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana announced that government had set its sights on conducting headcounts in the civil service to root out ghost-workers, as one of the initiatives.
Earlier this year, Northdale Hospital in Pietermaritzburg identified more than 120 ghost health workers, while the Msunduzi Municipality had discovered over 100 on its payroll. In Gauteng, the provincial health department is also conducting a similar audit and has frozen the salaries of 66 suspected ghost workers to date.
De Villiers said that as a portfolio committee tasked with oversight of the public service, “the time for half-measures and talk-shops is over”.
“Let us be clear, the phenomenon of ghost workers is not an issue of administrative error.
“The Department of Public Service and Administration (DPSA) confirmed before Parliament that ghost workers are present across all three spheres of government, affecting national and provincial departments, municipalities, agencies, and state-owned entities alike.
“For example, last year, the Auditor-General (AG) uncovered R6.4 million in salaries being paid to ghost workers at the Mpumalanga Department of Education. In May this year, the Gauteng health department froze the salaries of 230 employees who could not be verified,” De Villiers said.
“These are not invisible names on paper. Real people are drawing fraudulent salaries, and real taxpayer money is being siphoned into private pockets under the guise of legitimate employment. The DPSA has disclosed that inserting a ghost worker into the public payroll system requires collusion between at least three internal officials. This means we are dealing not with random lapses in judgment but with embedded criminal syndicates operating in our public institutions.”
He added that the data-driven approach of the joint audit represents a departure from the fragmented, ad hoc audits of the past. He added that they are also calling for this process to begin with a physical, in-person human verification audit of all government employees underpinned by mandatory biometric identification.
“Every person drawing a public salary must appear in person and be verified. The public has the right to know that the names on the payroll correspond to individuals who exist, who work, and who serve.”
“We mustn’t fool ourselves, the people behind the creation of ghost workers are syndicates – they are criminal organisations within the state. They work together. These aren’t rogue individuals just taking the chance, it is a symptom of corruption within the state that is highly organised.”
He said that the whole purpose of the joint audit is to establish the seriousness, the scope and also the action plan to deal with ghost workers.
De Villiers explained that they will reconvene with the DPSA and National Treasury in the third quarter of 2025 to receive a full progress report on the implementation of the joint ghost worker audit strategy.
The committee will also call on the Auditor-General of South Africa to expand its scope, requiring that all department and entity audits include verification of whether internal ghost employee audits have been conducted and if they were done credibly. They will also push for disciplinary and criminal action to follow.
