Home affairs goes ghost-hunting on state payrolls - Leon Schreiber — Home affairs minister Leon Schreiber

The department of home affairs has built a real-time biometric verification platform for national treasury designed to flush ghost employees out of government payrolls – a problem the state estimates cost the fiscus R3.9-billion in 2025.

The portal will go live on 15 June 2026 and run an initial two-month verification sweep across national and provincial departments, with employee records cross-checked against the National Population Register using liveness tests and real-time biometric matching.

Home affairs minister Leon Schreiber said on Tuesday that the platform could save taxpayers “billions of rands” by identifying ghost employees and others defrauding government payrolls.

A liveness test is a biometric check that confirms a person in front of the camera is a real, present human – not a photo, video, mask or deepfake – by detecting subtle cues like blinking, micro-movements and depth. Although not completely impenetrable, liveness checks are much harder to fake than physical document checks. They also bypass officials, removing an opportunity for corruption to poison the process.

According to home affairs, the system is built on the department’s trusted digital identity verification capabilities – the same stack underpinning a broader programme to modernise its services – and is linked to the National Population Register.

Plagued

Home affairs in July 2025 launched its revamped identity verification system described by the department as a “comprehensive upgrade” to its predecessor. As part of the upgrades, a new pricing structure for private sector users of the system was unveiled. Identity verification is used heavily by mobile operators, microfinanciers and banks, among others.

Home affairs confirmed to TechCentral that the newly built ghost-worker verification system was fully developed and paid for by home affairs. Government departments will not be charged for using the system. “The idea is to save taxpayer money by ensuring no ghost workers are paid,” a home affairs spokeswoman told TechCentral.

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Fraudulent payments to ghost workers have plagued government, South Africa’s largest single employer, for years. In the 2026 budget tabled in February, finance minister Enoch Godongwana revealed that an audit of government’s personnel and salary (Persal) system had flagged over 4 000 suspicious ghost-worker cases across national and provincial departments. Godongwana described it as “one of the most striking weaknesses of public financial management”.

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The project by home affairs is the latest in a string of digital milestones under Schreiber, who has positioned the department’s identity infrastructure as a backbone for wider state reform.