Tanzania searches for ‘ghost workers’

Tanzanian President John Magufuli

Tanzanian authorities have launched a national audit to find “ghost workers” and remove them from civil service payrolls under a corruption crackdown ordered by the president, a minister said.

The public sector wage bill has escalated sharply over the past few years, analysts say, partly because of the numbers of people registering fake names to collect extra wages.

 A 2015 audit found the government had paid $64.80 million to fake workers over that year.

“We are conducting an audit of employees across the entire civil service to establish the scale of the problem and cut ghost workers from the payroll,” Angellah Kairuki, Tanzania’s minister for public service management told Reuters.