Government paid R3.9 billion to employees who don’t exist

The government is ramping up efforts to identify and eliminate ghost employees across national and provincial departments through a soon-to-launch digital identity verification portal.

According to the Department of Home Affairs (DHA), which is behind the new portal, ghost employees and payment irregularities cost the national fiscus an estimated R3.9 billion in 2025.

On Tuesday, 26 May, the DHA announced that it had developed a “world-class” online real-time employee verification portal for the National Treasury.

This portal will support the government’s efforts to crack down on ghost employees and payment irregularities.

Ghost employees refer to individuals who receive payments from multiple departments, are inactive employees, or have bank account anomalies.

Built using the DHA’s digital identity verification capabilities and linked to the national population register, the new platform to identify these ghost employees is set to go live on 15 June 2026.

The verification process is scheduled to run for an initial two-month period across national and provincial government departments.

According to the DHA, the platform will enable liveness tests and biometric real-time verification of employee records to ensure that government personnel information is accurate, current, and reliable.

“If used consistently, this platform has the power to save South African taxpayers billions of rands,” Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber said. 

This will be done by leveraging enhanced biometric systems to identify ghost employees and others involved in defrauding government payrolls. 

The DHA described this project as the latest milestone on the department’s reform journey, which is aimed at driving digital transformation to build a capable, secure, and modern state.

“The application of the digital capabilities our reform work is now consistently delivering to this new use case demonstrates that the digital transformation of Home Affairs is laying the foundation for an entirely rebuilt state,” Schreiber said.

He added that the benefits of this reform work, and the DHA’s enhanced digital capabilities, are being felt widely across government and society.

Godongwana’s ghost busters

Over the past decade, ghost employees have emerged as a particularly problematic thorn in the government’s side, costing the fiscus billions and putting it near the top of the Treasury’s priority list.

In the May 2025 Budget, the government announced that it had begun a process to identify ghost workers and other payroll irregularities in the public service.

In his Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement, delivered on 12 November 2025, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana outlined the progress the government has made in this regard.

He explained that previous initiatives to uncover ghost workers relied on an inefficient census methodology.

Now, the government has been taking a more data-driven approach, integrating several administrative datasets to more easily detect anomalies across state departments.

According to Godongwana, this approach paid off, with around 8,854 cases identified by November 2025.

“We are beginning to see the results of this collaboration. We have already uncovered close to 9,000 high-risk cases that have been flagged for further verification,” he said.

The Treasury’s war on ghost workers forms part of its Targeted and Responsible Savings (TARS) initiative, aimed at cutting down wasteful government spending.

Sometimes referred to as South Africa’s version of the United States’ DOGE, the Treasury’s TARS initiative recommends programmes that can be cut or scaled down to reduce government expenditure.

“This initiative has helped elevate a different dimension of the budget process by forcing departments to engage with programme efficiency and effectiveness when seeking funds for different priorities,” the Treasury explained in the 2026 Budget.

For example, the government recently reported that, since the implementation of TARS, over R200 million has been saved in fraudulent or incorrect social grant payments.

As the programme continues, these savings should only grow, with the 2026 Budget revealing that the TARS initiative has identified R6.7 billion worth of savings.