More than 10 years have passed since the last time a review was done to weed out ghost names from the public service payroll.
Treasury Secretary, Dairi Vele, said the last time an exercise was carried out to review public servants on the payroll was in 2003, 14 years ago.
He said after that exercise, 13, 000 ghost names who had been receiving salaries for about a decade were removed from the payroll.
During his presentation at the National Parliament Induction Programme yesterday, Vele said one of the reasons for the blow out in the budget is attributed to ghost names on the payroll as well as personal emoluments.
He was then questioned by Madang Open MP, Bryan Kramer, what correlation ghost names had with the budget deficit.
“Everyone keeps mentioning ghost names on payroll so I don’t know how that correlates to a K2 to K3 billion deficit, unless K2 billion is spent on ghost names,” said Kramer.
While not directly answering the question Vele said what was needed now was to ensure the resources were available to carry out a physical audit, especially in other centers of the country.
He also said the other issue is to make more money by broadening the economic base and not rely so much in the extractive sector.
“All we can try to do is to make sure we now have the resources to go through and go after those (ghost names) because it’s in the provinces.
“What we have to do now is to make sure that we focus on the non-mining side and if we plan on that basis, then everything we get above that we can say that’s a windfall and we can do some nice things with it, but let’s plan on the base of that,” Vele said.