President Bola Tinubu has ordered a comprehensive forensic audit of the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS) and other federal government systems to eliminate fake agencies, ghost workers and payroll fraud.
The directive was announced on Friday by Bayo Onanuga, Special Adviser to the President on Information and Strategy. Tinubu instructed the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Taiwo Oyedele, to oversee and coordinate the exercise.
The order follows a Federal Executive Council resolution of 19 August 2026, taken in response to findings by the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) on the existence of “fake agencies”, ghost workers and other control failures.
According to Onanuga, the audit comprises two interconnected components. The first focuses on a forensic examination of government systems, particularly IPPIS and related payroll, personnel, pension and financial-management platforms. Investigators will examine reported cases of ghost workers and payroll fraud, reconcile figures identified by the ICPC, trace how fictitious or ineligible persons were enrolled, and review access, identity, biometric and bank-account controls.
The exercise will also scrutinise interfaces between IPPIS and other platforms, including the Government Integrated Financial Management Information System (GIFMIS), Remita, the Treasury Single Account (TSA) and Sub-TSA, to determine whether fraud resulted from system defects, process failures, inadequate segregation of duties or deliberate circumvention.
The second component covers all Federal Government agencies, departments, commissions, councils, parastatals and other bodies. It seeks to establish a definitive inventory, verify their legal basis, and examine how entities obtain official recognition, budgetary consideration, correspondence privileges, office facilities and access to government systems.
The presidency stated that the overall objective is to establish the nature and extent of weaknesses in the government’s control systems and determine how those weaknesses have been exploited. Beyond identifying individual cases of fraud, the audit is expected to strengthen government architecture, close systemic loopholes, improve data verification and reconciliation, reinforce accountability, and ensure that only duly constituted entities and eligible personnel have access to public resources.
The audit team will work with the ICPC and have full access to official records. The development comes amid persistent concerns over payroll integrity. ICPC investigations have previously uncovered hundreds of suspected ghost workers on the IPPIS platform and secured the forfeiture of nearly ₦942 million linked to such fraud. Earlier clean-up exercises have also removed tens of thousands of ineligible names from the federal payroll.
The Tinubu administration has consistently listed the protection of public funds and the elimination of leakages among its priorities. The latest directive is presented as a decisive response to systemic vulnerabilities exposed by the ICPC’s findings.
