Treasury Launches Crackdown After Nearly 9,000 Ghost Workers Found on State Payroll

South Africa’s National Treasury has begun a sweeping purge of thousands of suspected ghost employees who have been quietly draining public funds. The discovery, revealed in the Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement (MTBPS), shows just how deeply fraud has infiltrated the government’s payroll system.

Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana confirmed that Treasury flagged 8,854 cases where individuals were receiving payments from multiple government departments — a shocking discovery that raises serious questions about internal controls and oversight.

Treasury says its ghost-worker investigation uncovered cases where salaries were still being paid to people who were inactive, no longer employed, or listed under suspicious banking details. Officials also found individuals appearing across more than one government database, suggesting patterns of duplication and potential syndicate activity.

Godongwana stressed that the clean-up operation forms part of government’s wider savings initiative, which also targets social grant fraud and the widespread practice of “double dipping”.

However, Director-General Dr Duncan Pieterse cautioned that the numbers remain preliminary and must undergo rigorous verification.

“We’ve worked closely with SARS using confidential and anonymised tax data,” Pieterse said. “But we will only know the true financial loss once the verification is complete.”

The large-scale payroll audit marks one of the most aggressive attempts yet to curb wasteful expenditure within the state. As verification continues, more fraudulent cases are expected to surface, raising hopes that the long-standing ghost worker problem may finally be addressed.