Former Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun, has detailed how the Federal Government leveraged technology to eliminate massive payroll fraud, revealing that the integration of the Bank Verification Number led to the discovery of 45,000 ‘ghost workers.’
Speaking at the Citadel School of Government Dialogue series in Lagos, Adeosun explained that before the intervention, the federal payroll was the government’s single largest expenditure, riddled with inefficiencies that traditional biometric efforts had failed to solve.
She noted that previous attempts at cleaning the payroll through biometrics had frequently stalled, particularly due to resistance from paramilitary groups such as the Police and Army, who refused to cooperate with centralised systems.
To solve this, her team bypassed the need for new biometrics by using the existing BVN database.