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Rabat – Despite repetitive governmental vows to eliminate ghost workers, the social and economic issue remains a prevalent phenomenon in Morocco.
Different ministries and public departments have issued numerous estimates on the subject over the past years, but the data available is likely to be underestimating the scale of the problem.
Earlier this month, the Moroccan daily Assabah stated that there are 90,000 ghost workers in the public sector, arguing that the government continues to turn a blind eye to the situation and allows this illegal act to prosper.
In June, Rabat Mayor Asmaa Rhalou told local media that only 1,000 out of 3,400 civil servants accounted for in the city council actually go to work. The remaining 2,400 hold positions within the city council and have never shown up to work.
To address the issue, Rhalou promised to launch an investigation “without fear of possible retaliation.”
The Rabat Mayor is not the first Moroccan official to pledge to eliminate ghost workers. Many ministries and public institutions have expressed their commitment to putting an end to the situation, promising they would launch multiple anti-fraud operations and increase audits for better transparency.
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In January 2015, the Ministry in charge of public service fired 800 ghost workers that joined the public sector in 2014. Later that same year, Morocco’s General Directorate for National Security (DGSN) reported that it had 300 ghost police officers. Two months later, the Ministry of Education unveiled that it had 600 ghost teachers and administrators.
Type of frauds
While the aforementioned cases of ghost workers in Morocco do not specify the type of payroll fraud, it is likely that most instances are related to no-show ghost employees, fictitious employees, or family members hired as ghost employees.
A 2016 Nigerian study led by Akeem Tunde Nafiu, Momoh Yalo, and Danlami Joseph Aduk found that there are eight types of fraud related to ghost workers. Although the research was conducted in Nigeria, the types of fraud identified are generalizable, says the World Bank.
According to the research, senior public officials often receive a share of an employee or civil servant’s salary in exchange for turning a blind eye to the situation. In some cases, they are more involved in fraud as they create fictitious people, continue to issue payrolls for dead people, or use nepotism for issuing additional payrolls for their personal benefit.
Despite the illegality and perceived unethicality of such acts, many in Morocco and worldwide have opted for ghost worker fraud with 29% of all organizations worldwide experiencing payroll fraud, says the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners.
The logic behind payroll fraud
According to American sociologist and criminologist Donald Ray Cressey, the ghost workers’ phenomenon can be explained by the “fraud triangle” theory which focuses on three components, pressure, opportunity, and rationalization.
The theory argues that an individual commits a fraudulent act when they are under financial or/and emotional pressure. Emotional pressure can come from dissatisfaction with the working environment or a desire to reach personal and professional goals faster.
Once the individual is set to commit fraud, they work on detecting potential opportunities with low costs of punishment. This appears to be easier in bureaucracies with poor transparency and record management systems, which is the case in Morocco.
When the two first conditions are met, the individual then works on justifying the fraudulent act to themselves in a process called rationalization.
As the three conditions are likely to be met with a bit of risk-taking sense, the likelihood of payroll fraud increases particularly in untransparent bureaucracies like in Morocco.
Read Also: Morocco Arrests 31 People For Fraud in Public Health Sector
So what can be done?
The World Bank recommends the introduction of anti-corruption, transparency, and accountability mechanisms to prevent the exploitation of national systems.
The bank has called for adopting performance-based financing, strengthening human resource databases, and implementing public expenditure tracking surveys to limit payroll fraud and increase accountability.
Biometrics can further support anti-corruption and anti-fraud operations. The use of fingerprints and iris scans in workplaces provides a solid tracking system for attendance.
In Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, and Zimbabwe have notably adopted biometrics technology to detect payroll fraud cases. In August, Ghana’s National Identification Authority reported 148,000 incidents of payroll fraud in the public sector through a biometric audit.
Two years prior, Zimbabwe found 10,000 ghost workers after conducting a biometric exercise to collect data on all civil servants and compare them with the Registrar’s Office.
As the world heads toward a recession, Morocco needs to cut its expenditure on ghost workers to serve the social segments in much need of public support such as elders and job-seeking youth. It is time for the North African country to adopt strict audit measures to limit payroll fraud.
