The ongoing payroll verification exercise in Rivers State has raised a bigger question beyond the removal of suspected ghost workers from government records: who put the names there, who approved the payments and who ultimately received the money?
Governor Siminalayi Fubara has defended the comprehensive payroll verification exercise being conducted across the state’s 23 local government areas, describing it as an administrative reform aimed at eliminating irregularities, reducing financial leakages and strengthening fiscal discipline.
Fubara, who has a professional background as a Treasury Officer, made the position known while speaking at the commissioning of the Omademe Internal Roads Project in Ikwerre Local Government Area.
He rejected suggestions that the exercise was politically motivated, insisting that the payroll sanitisation was about protecting the financial interests of Rivers State rather than settling political differences.
Figures previously released by the Acting Head of the Rivers State Civil Service, Dr Inyingi Brown, indicate the scale of the problem uncovered during an earlier biometric verification exercise.
The state civil service nominal roll reportedly contained about 43,000 employees before verification, but biometric checks confirmed 37,703 as genuine, leaving 5,397 entries unverified or potentially fraudulent.
The pensioners’ register also contained about 25,000 names, of which 19,186 were verified, leaving 5,814 entries that could not be confirmed.
At the local government level, about 2,600 pensioners were listed, while 2,004 were successfully verified, leaving 596 unverified entries.
The figures have strengthened the argument for a deeper investigation into the state’s payroll system.
Removing an unverified name from a payroll may immediately stop further payments, but it does not answer the fundamental questions surrounding the origin of the entry.
Who processed the appointment?
Who inserted the name into the nominal roll?
Who authorised the salary?
Which bank account received the money?
Were supervisors, payroll officers or other officials involved?
And, most importantly, where did the money go?
These questions are now central to the debate over the Rivers payroll cleanup.
A payroll verification exercise can save government money by stopping payments to fictitious or improperly maintained accounts. But analysts have warned that simply deleting questionable names could leave the people who created and operated the system untouched.
The issue is particularly important where payroll fraud involves deceased, retired or resigned workers whose names allegedly remain on government payrolls, as well as individuals who may never have worked for government but whose identities or documents were allegedly used to create fictitious employment records.
There is also a need to distinguish between deliberate payroll fraud and genuine workers whose records may have failed verification because of administrative errors, documentation problems or difficulties during the biometric exercise.
The Nigeria Labour Congress in Rivers State has reportedly raised concerns about the possibility of genuine workers being affected and called for mechanisms through which affected employees can establish their status.
This distinction is important because an unverified name is not automatically proof of criminal conduct.
A person may fail a verification exercise for several reasons, and due process is necessary before an individual is labelled a fraudster.
However, where investigations establish that fictitious employees were deliberately created and public funds diverted through them, accountability should extend beyond the names removed from the payroll.
The Rivers State Government would need to trace the financial transactions associated with suspicious payroll entries, establish the officials responsible for approvals and identify the beneficiaries of the payments.
Such an investigation could also reveal whether the problem was caused by isolated administrative lapses or by organised networks operating within the public service.
The issue is not entirely new to Nigeria. Previous payroll audits at federal and state levels have exposed significant numbers of ghost workers and produced substantial savings, demonstrating the vulnerability of public payroll systems to manipulation.
The Rivers exercise therefore presents an opportunity to move beyond periodic headcounts and develop a continuous personnel verification system linked to reliable biometric and financial identification mechanisms.
Technology, however, cannot completely solve the problem if individuals with access to the system deliberately manipulate records.
Effective payroll reform therefore requires both technological controls and human accountability.
The government must ensure that responsibility for staff recruitment, personnel records, payroll approval and payment processing is sufficiently separated to reduce opportunities for collusion.
There should also be regular independent audits, secure whistleblowing channels and clear procedures for investigating suspicious entries.
Where evidence points to criminal activity, the relevant anti-corruption and law-enforcement agencies should be invited to investigate and, where appropriate, prosecute those responsible.
The ultimate test of the Rivers payroll cleanup should therefore not be the number of names deleted from the register or the amount saved from the salary bill alone.
The bigger measure of success should be whether the exercise exposes the networks that created the fraudulent entries, identifies those who benefited from the payments, recovers misappropriated public funds and prevents the system from being manipulated again.
For Rivers State, the question is no longer simply where are the ghost workers?
The more important question is: where are the people behind them?
I found the report and cross-checked the key figures. The important angle is that the Rivers payroll verification has uncovered thousands of unverified payroll entries, but the bigger accountability question is who created, approved and benefited from those entries. Governor Siminalayi Fubara has defended the exercise as a fiscal-cleanup measure across the state’s 23 local government areas.
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