Government paid millions to employees who don’t exist

Many government departments across South Africa are rife with ghost employees, costing the country millions and keeping skilled people out of the workforce while corrupt officials line their pockets.

Portfolio Committee on Public Service and Administration chairperson Jan de Villiers spoke out against the scourge of ghost workers in the country’s public sector.

This was discussed at a media briefing by chairpersons of the governance cluster in the National Assembly, the Mail & Guardian reported.

Here, de Villiers stated that the era of treating ghost workers as a clerical irregularity was over. “This is not merely a payroll anomaly,” he said. “It is a deliberate and orchestrated form of systemic corruption.”

In the 2025/2026 National Budget, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana revealed that the National Treasury were undertaking budget reforms to improve spending quality and root out waste.

Since 2013, the National Treasury and provincial treasuries have assessed over R312 billion in spending programmes, highlighting shortcomings in policy costing, implementation and oversight that lead to duplication and waste.

Previous reviews have identified savings of R37.5 billion that can be achieved from operating model changes and oversight improvements.

In addition, Godongwana said that the government has begun a process to identify ghost workers and other payroll irregularities.

Essentially, ghost workers are non-existent or fictitious persons listed on a company’s payroll records, allowing someone to collect wages or benefits fraudulently.

Previous initiatives to uncover ghost workers relied on an inefficient census methodology, the National Treasury said.

The new data-driven approach will integrate multiple administrative datasets, which will more easily detect anomalies across national and provincial departments.

Millions down the drain

De Villiers explained on Newzroom Afrika that a key issue surrounding ghost workers is that the extent of the problem is unknown.

However, there have been some audits where ghost workers have been uncovered. For example, the Department of Education in Mpumalanga was found to have paid R6.5 million in salaries to ghost workers.

In the Department of Health in Gauteng, 230 ghost employees were discovered.

Using that as a sample, he said it is clear that there are thousands of ghost workers all across public service and inside government departments.

Alarmingly, de Villiers explained that creating ghost workers on the system requires at least three people working together to load them onto the system.

“But it actually takes more than that,” he said. “It takes more than three people to keep the system going.

“That should be a clear indication to anybody that ghost workers are just one of the symptoms of organised crime inside the government department.”

De Villiers stressed that ghost workers need to be identified. At the same time, however, people need to realise that behind each ghost worker’s salary is a real person benefiting.

These individuals are siphoning taxpayer money into their own pockets and need to be investigated, prosecuted, and jailed.

It also prevents skilled and willing job seekers from finding employment within the government. Considering that the country had a 32.9% unemployment rate as of Q1 2025, this is deeply concerning.

Young people, in particular, are disproportionately struggling with finding employment, with 15–34-year-olds facing a 46.1% unemployment rate.

Addressing the ghost employee problem would create employment opportunities for South Africans at little to no additional cost to the government.

Part of the problem is the fact that government departments handle staffing decentralised at the moment, de Villiers pointed out.

Each department appoints its own public servants within certain guidelines, but there’s no national guideline for conducting audits to identify ghost workers.

He said that the solution will require a combination of old-school tactics – such as physical audits and people reporting to work and proving they exist – alongside artificial intelligence and technology.

Other solutions like looking at payslips, ID numbers, and biometric data to determine if people are receiving more than one salary, can also be utilised.

In addition, the government can also look into whether those loaded on the system have fake or real IDs and whether the bank accounts linked to those salaries belong to the individuals actually receiving the money.