In addition to this, however, there is another major issue that countries such as India, Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Afghanistan are increasingly looking towards biometric systems to help them tackle: ghost workers. Ghost workers are made-up employees, usually working for the public sector such as teachers or police officers, that are collecting paychecks for people who don’t work at all.

Countries are able to tackle this through registering all their public employees with biometrics and eliminating anyone not enrolled or any repeat registrants form their databases. Such programs have been implemented in at least 15 countries already with Nigeria using its system to eliminate 43,000 ghost employees with an expected additional 107,000 ghost employees to be eliminated in the police force alone.

The biometric solution is already proving to be a successful option as the past solutions to manually determine real workers from fake ones would leave the door open to bureaucrats to simply repeat the process of creating fake employees. In addition to being a be to detect repeat employees, enforcing biometrics as a requirement to get paid and to work in the first place eliminates the possibility of an employee registering twice, registering a fake person and stops them from being able to pick-up multiple payments.

In countries such as India, where the population size is staggering, reports expect the full-scale implementation of biometric systems for salaries and tax payments will yield $23 billion in savings annually for the government.

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