Former Finance Minister, Kemi Adeosun, has shared how the Nigerian government uncovered thousands of fake workers on its payroll by using the Bank Verification Number (BVN) system. She made this known during a talk at the Citadel School of Government Dialogue in Lagos.

She explained that paying salaries was one of the government’s biggest expenses, but the system had many problems. Earlier efforts to clean up the payroll using biometric data did not work well, mainly because some groups like the police and army did not fully cooperate.

To solve this problem, her team decided to use the already existing BVN database instead of creating a new system. By matching the payroll records with BVN data, they discovered about 45,000 names that should not have been there.

Adeosun also clarified that not all cases involved organized fraud. In many situations, one person’s BVN was linked to multiple salaries, or payments were still going to people who had died or left their jobs.

She added that these issues showed weaknesses in the system, rather than large criminal networks, and highlighted the need for better monitoring and technology in government processes.