KZN Education launches major crackdown on ghost employees in payroll audit

The KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education has vowed to root out all ghost employees from its payroll, warning that anyone found to be fraudulently earning a salary, along with those who facilitated it, will face criminal charges.

KZN head of department Nkosinathi Ngcobo made the commitment after concluding the final round of physical employee verifications at the department’s Pietermaritzburg head office this week.

Ngcobo said the net would also be cast wider to include officials who enabled fraudulent salary payments in the past.

"We will open criminal charges against ghost workers and those who are on the Persal system and the facilitators," he said.

He added that the Persal system, which uses a unique identification number for each employee, makes tracing such cases straightforward.

KZN Education is the province’s largest employer, with nearly 100 000 employees across more than 6 200 schools, most of them teachers. The verification exercise required all staff to physically present themselves at their workplaces, while auditors visited employees on sick leave or medical boarding.

Ngcobo told the finance portfolio committee that the verification and headcount process would extend beyond staff to include learners, following long-standing concerns about inflated enrolment numbers at some schools.

Suspicions that certain principals and school governing bodies were overstating learner and staff figures, a common form of fraud in the education sector, prompted the audit. Such inflation directly affects the department’s budget allocations, including teacher posts and funding provided through the norms and standards system. Schools also stand to gain more through the National School Nutrition Programme (NSNP) when numbers are inflated.

"We want to know how many people are on our payroll and how many are ghosts," Ngcobo said. He added that part of the learner verification process would address cases of South African pupils without birth certificates as well as foreign national learners.

Department spokesperson Muzi Mahlambi said the province was satisfied with progress.

"The Department of Education has embarked on employee and learner verification. We are happy to report that the process is going very well in KwaZulu-Natal," he said.

Mahlambi confirmed that the school-level phase was completed two weeks ago.

"This week we started with office-based officials at circuit, district and head office level, and the HoD, Mr Ngcobo, also presented himself to the verifiers."

He said the initiative would help the department maintain accurate records and strengthen financial planning.-Additional reporting by Siphesihle Buthelezi

SUNDAY TRIBUNE