The Special Investigating Unit (SIU) is probing more than 1,000 cases of ghost workers sucking monthly salaries from the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa) without doing any work.
In 2022, it was reported that about 1,159 ghost employees suddenly vanished from the Prasa payroll system in a single day when the State-owned entity launched Operation Ziveze, which sought to crack down on the scourge of ghost workers since 2021.
At the time, the publication reported that then transport minister Fikile Mblalula said the disappearance of the 1,159 people saved Prasa R200 million in salaries that were being paid to these people fraudulently, as the ghost workers were not doing any work for the parastatal.
On Thursday, SIU spokesperson Kaizer Kganyago told broadcaster Newzroom Afrika that the fraud continued well after Operation Ziveze.
“With the ghost workers the investigation is still going on. You will remember there was an investigation that was done by Prasa itself, called (Operation) Ziveze and we are now looking at what they found,” he said.
“That is part of the new investigation that came up this year under Proclamation 153 of 2024 because the previous one we are done with it but there is now a new one that emanates mainly from the State capture investigations,” said Kganyago.
“We are still looking, but we have found that even the process of putting together this Ziveze was not done in a proper manner and therefore we are looking into all those transactions. We will give the public that information when it becomes available.”
He added that the number of the ghost employees at Prasa is now believed to be more than 1,200.
“At the moment, we are investigating 1,277 of these ghost workers and we have so far finalized 620 of that, and the ones that we still ongoing is 657,” said Kganyago.
He said in the main, ghost workers are often Prasa workers who died but they were not removed from the payroll, or new banking details were added for the deceased people.
Other instances are of people who were dismissed or left Prasa for different reasons including retirement, yet they continued to be on the payroll.
“What we have identified that when people leave the organization, like in retirement or people die, or for whatever reason they are dismissed, they are not taken off the system and there is continuous payment that is paid to whoever it is because we are still investigating,” Kganyago said.
“We have to check whether they were paying to the direct accounts of those people, the (bank accounts) they used when they were still employed, or it was paid to different accounts altogether. In most of the instances so far, we see people that were already on the system of Prasa and then left for one reason are the main ghost employees.”
In 2022, Mbalula said Operation Ziveze was launched to verify all Prasa employees after material irregularities were uncovered within Prasa’s ICT and payroll systems.
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