After integrating the payroll of the Nigeria Police Force into the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS), the Federal Government of Nigeria has discovered 80,115 ghost officers on the force's payroll.
According to a Premium Times report, before the integration, members of the Nigeria Police Force on the payroll stood at 371,800. But a subsequent audit from the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation, showed it to be actually 291,685 with a gross salary of about ₦22.3 billion.
The report says protests had earlier followed the planned integration of the police payroll with IPPIS as protesters said they feared hiccups, but the government insisted.
IPPIS was announced in November 2016 to automate the payroll of civil servants and weed out ghost workers, and it seems to be doing exactly that.
Suggested read: The Federal Government wants to automate the payroll of the Nigerian civil service
According to its website, IPPIS is a " Department under the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation responsible for payment of salaries and wages directly to Government employee’s bank account with appropriate deductions and remittances of 3rd party payments."
Nigeria has always had a problem of duplicated databases that end up defeating their true purposes. In an article on Techpoint, the writer suggested creating a single unified view of existing records and fixing data collection methods as solutions to this problem.
Suggested read: A simple solution to Nigeria’s unified database problem
For the payments and remittance of civil servants' wages, IPPIS is the solution to the database problem in this category. And it is also saving lots of money in the process
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Nigeria's Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun said the government has saved over ₦68 billion on personnel cost though the full deployment of the IPPS in the payrolls of MDAs.
The Minister however did not reveal the exact cost saved from exposing the over 80,000 ghost police officers.