The Banks captured no fewer than 30 million workers during the Biometric Verification Number [BVN} registration exercise, the Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun, has said.

She said the exercise assisted in eliminating ghost workers from the federal payroll.

The Minister, in a statement yesterday, expressed gratitude to all stakeholders for the success of the programme.

“Under the BVN programme, more than 30 million biometric and personal data records were captured. The BVN provides a pool of reliable data against which records held on the Federal Government’s payroll will be cross-checked to identify inconsistencies, including duplicate payments, payments to dormant accounts, multiple payments to a single account holder and non-matching of data provided among others.” 

According to her, “genuine members of staff have nothing to worry about, while those that have been collecting multiple salaries and others, who hitherto engaged in payroll fraud, would be caught.”    

She hinted that the Ministry has built-in controls mechanism to counteract those seeking to transfer their salary to micro-finance, mortgage bank and other non-BVN accounts in order to evade detection. 

“Since the advent of BVN, we have seen a trend of such requests for transfer from commercial bank accounts to non BVN accounts. Accordingly, we plan to undertake a detailed review of all persons, who have made such requested in the last 12 months.