Finance minister to investigate 23,000 civil servants over multiple BVNs

Finance minister, Kemi Adeosun, made a startling revelation before the Senate on Thursday, when she disclosed that 23,000 federal civil servants had multiple Bank Verification Numbers (BVNs) and would be investigated.

Adeosun also revealed that 320,000 federal civil servants had been captured in the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS) in the last three months in contrast to 295,000 captured in five years.

Adeosun, who appeared before the Senate Committee on Finance to defend the ministry’s budget, said the revelation came out following efforts to synchronise the IPPIS with the BVNs.

According to Adeosun, most of the salary accounts traced through BVN are held with the same bank and opened the same day.

The minister, who vowed that she would leave no stone unturned in ensuring that the money was recovered, said some civil servants appeared as ghost workers, citing an instance where a particular civil servant collected salaries for 20 workers under various pseudonyms.

This, she said, was responsible for padding in the personnel cost of some Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) in the current budget defence.

Recall that the Senate Committee on Education had raised the alarm over the padding of personnel cost of parastatal in the Education Ministry to the tune of N10 billion.

Going forward, Adeosun said not only would the payments be recovered, the culprits would be handed over to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and other investigating agencies for prosecution.

She expressed optimism that by June this year, all federal employees would have been captured in the IPPIS programme, saying this would clean up the issue of ghost workers in the federal civil service.

“We have identified that there are people who appear on our payroll multiple times. Because as you know, BVN links all the accounts of one person. So, we are seeing in some payrolls 20 people with the same BVN. So, we have now started the process. In fact, this morning (Wednesday), we had a meeting on how we are going to clean them off. And we are having a meeting on Monday with the Unions to agree the format. The process will be that we should suspend that person from the payroll pending the investigation. We will try as far as possible to complete that investigation within 30 days. We really need to clean our payroll off.

“As we speak, we have about 23,000 that we need to investigate for various reasons. Either the BVN is linked to multiple payments or the name on the BVN account is not consistent with the name on our payroll.

“We believe that if we are able to get everybody unto the BVN platform, we will be able to save a considerable amount on personnel cost. Not only will we remove those people from our payroll, we will also be going after the banks concerned to recover our money.  Because in some cases, we are seeing that all the accounts are held with the same bank. And in some cases, all were opened on the same day. So, if banks have colluded with people to pad our payroll, we are not only going to stop those payments but we are going to recover our money,” Adeosun told the John Enoh-led Committee.

Explaining how the present administration captured more workers on the IPPIS and discovered that 23,000 of them have multiple BVNs, Adeosun said: “When we came into the administration, we looked at the project critically and we realised that if we can get more people on IPPIS, we believe that our salary cost will come down.

“So, I looked very critically at it with the Director of IPPIS and his team and we decided to change the strategy; that rather than getting the physical person to come, we will take the payroll that we have, which everybody is paid into a bank account – nobody collects cash. So, from that bank account details, we will get the BVN, from the BVN we can get the biometric data.

“So, that considerably accelerated the process of getting people unto IPPIS. Within the last two months that we have been on this programme, we have been able to enrol 320,000 civil servants using BVN in less than three months. That’s compared to 295,000 in five years. And we are very confident that with our programme, we will now be able to get every federally paid civil servant unto IPPIS by June.”

The IPPIS, a World Bank funded programme, which started five years ago, aims at creating a centralized database system for Nigerian Public Service with single, accurate source of information about Federal Government employees.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) through the Banker’ Committee and in collaboration with all banks in Nigeria on February 14, 2014 launched a centralized biometric identification system for the banking industry tagged Bank Verification Number (BVN).

It is a modern security measure aims at reducing fraud and illegal banking transactions in the Nigerian banking system.

 

OWEDE AGBAJILEKE