Africa-Press – South-Africa. The government has made progress in its efforts to identify and remove so-called “ghost workers” from its payroll, with around 8,854 cases already identified.
Ghost workers refer to individuals who receive payments from multiple departments, are inactive employees, or have bank account anomalies.
Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana outlined the government’s ghost worker crackdown in his Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement on Wednesday, 12 November.
This comes after Godongwana announced in the May 2025 Budget that the government had begun a process to identify ghost workers and other payroll irregularities in the public service.
He explained that previous initiatives to uncover ghost workers relied on an inefficient census methodology.
However, the government’s new data-driven approach, which integrates multiple administrative datasets, can more easily detect anomalies across national and provincial departments.
This approach appears to have paid off, with Godongwana saying in the MTBPS that the government is “waging war” on ghost workers in the public service.
He said the National Treasury is working closely with the Department of Public Service Administration and Home Affairs on a data-driven approach that integrates systems across the government.
“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.
In the MTBPS, the Treasury specified that 8,854 such cases have been identified, with the ghost worker identifications process also helping to identify individuals appearing on multiple government systems.
The Treasury said these efforts are expected to improve efficiency and potentially address staff shortages in the government.
This crackdown forms part of the Treasury’s Targeted and Responsible Savings (TARS) initiative, which recommends programmes that can be cut or scaled down to reduce government expenditure.
Godongwana said that, based on initial work over the past few months, the TARS initiative is expected to realise medium-term savings of R6.7 billion.
Calling in the big guns
Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber
South Africa’s ghost worker crackdown will require the input from various government departments and organisations, with the Auditor-General and the Department of Public Service and Administration already involved.
The Department of Home Affairs will also play a crucial role, with the clampdown heavily reliant on identity verification to be effective.
In a briefing to the Portfolio Committee on Public Service and Administration in September 2025, the National Treasury highlighted the critical role digital solutions will play in identifying ghost workers.
This includes biometric verification, smart IDs, single sign-on systems, and digital credential wallets.
These reforms are not only expected to help prevent and identify ghost workers but also improve the public service’s efficiency, security and accountability going forward, reducing the risk of payroll fraud.
In the Portfolio Committee briefing, it was revealed that South Africa’s public service may be losing more than R3.9 billion a year to ghost workers.
In early September 2025, the Treasury issued a binding circular requiring all government departments to conduct full physical verification of every person on their payroll.
According to this circular, departments’ reports must be submitted by 28 February 2025.
Identifying and removing these employees from the government’s payroll will go a long way in cutting the state’s substantial wage bill, which consumes a significant share of the national budget.
South Africa’s public servants will receive a 5.5% increase in the current financial year, at a cost of R7.3 billion to the government.
Over the next three years, with the National Treasury honouring the public sector wage agreement, the government will spend R23.3 billion to implement the agreed-upon increases.
This puts immense strain on the government’s finances as the public sector wage bill has consistently increased faster than headline inflation.
At the same time, South Africa’s economic growth has been nearly stagnant, meaning the public wage bill has skyrocketed from below 6% of GDP in 1994 to above 10% in the past financial year.
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