Ghosts, from civil servants to students, can be exorcised

And one of the best ways to banish ghosts from an organisation’s payroll is through technology.

“It amazes me that we have ghost workers in the age of databases and block chains when simple analysis can weed out of these ghosts,” says Dr XN Iraki, a lecturer at the University of Nairobi.

Technologies such as block-chain that Iraki is talking about will go a long way in addressing this problem, but that is more for the future than the present.

Doreen Mbogho, Talent Partner at audit firm Deloitte East Africa, says organisations need to put in place effective and proactive financial as well as Human Resource controls.

“One of the proactive ways to identify ghost workers is conducting regular staff audits.”

These will help to identify and expunge from payroll all non-existent individuals including those; hired irregularly, duplicated individuals, identification mismatch, and employees past the normal retirement age,” notes Ms Mbogho.

Mbogho says that the use of technology is another effective and efficient way to deal with ghost workers.

“For example, installing biometric doors will require staff fingerprints to allow access into the organisation premises. The biometric data can then be linked to the institution’s payroll system, which would help to get rid of ghost workers.”

However, in order for this to work, an organisation needs to have a well-functioning human resources department.

It is at the human resource departments that ghost workers are sneaked into the payroll.

Dr Bitange Ndemo, who was recently appointed to chair a taskforce of ten people on blockchain and artificial intelligence, says there are looking into how they can employ these new technologies to make auditing proactive rather than historical.

With the new decentralised system, everyone can see who is in the payroll.

“What we hope is that audit can be done proactively. Right now, we do audits historically,” says Ndemo.