What is a ghost employee? How does it affect the payroll system of a company? Lastly, how do we detect and prevent existence of it?

Ghost worker- Technically speaking a ghost worker or ghost employee is someone recorded on the payroll system, but who does not work for the organisation. The ghost worker/ghost employee can be a real person, who with or without their knowledge, is placed on the payroll, or a fictitious person invented by the dishonest staff. A major consideration is whether you have to look for real people to be your ghost workers or if you are able to enrol ghosts with fictitious identities. Real people come with high costs and risks. They will want to profit from their participation in the scheme and each additional individual aware of the scam increases the risk that the wrong people will find out. This could further increase costs to keep things quiet or even put an end to the scam entirely.

What can be done about it?

It is critical to address the issue of ghost employee fraud and take essential measures to prevent it. Here are several practices that can help thwart ghost employees:

1.  Proper implementation of payroll policies - Ensure that payroll policies are written in place and up-to-date. This will ensure that there are proper protocols for payroll processes and ensure that employees familiarize themselves with it.

2. Removal of resigned / terminated employees - Whenever an employee resigns or has been terminated, ensure that their records are properly updated..

3. Separation of payroll duties - This general principle of control in the payroll department is evident amongst many of the best practices of payroll standards. Payroll systems should never be solely handled by one employee. For instance, the employee running the system should be different from the employee approving the payroll. Rotate the responsibility of payroll operations between a numbers of people to reduce any opportunity for fraudulent activities.

a ghost employee is an employee that is an undocumented employee, they dont have any records in HR department but they're included in payroll system. but the question is, how this employee/s bypass the process of the employment/recruitment. the HR department is responsible to this matter. thats why work process flow is very important in each department so that we can monitor all the employees background.

Technically speaking a ghost worker or ghost employee is someone recorded on the payroll system, but who does not work for the organisation. The ghost worker/ghost employee can be a real person, who with or without their knowledge, is placed on the payroll, or a fictitious person invented by the dishonest staff. A major consideration is whether you have to look for real people to be your ghost workers or if you are able to enrol ghosts with fictitious identities. Real people come with high costs and risks. They will want to profit from their participation in the scheme and each additional individual aware of the scam increases the risk that the wrong people will find out. This could further increase costs to keep things quiet or even put an end to the scam entirely.

a ghost employee is a person recorded on the payroll system, but who does not work for the busines, it can be a real person or not who is placed on the payroll

A ghost employee is the one who affects the company's reputation by negativity and  defame who is selected on the basis of influence and not qualification and quantities,

I would second the opinion of Ms. Manasa.

Thank you very much for inviting me. I agree with the answers of our experts....................

A Ghost Employee is a non existing Employee, but only in Pay role. It will affect the Company's Reputation, leading to Frauds, spoiling even the Good workers and Morally incorrect.

It will affect the H.R. Dept and Accounts Dept from normal functioning, leading to Fraudster.

To eleminate this, all Retired, Terminated and Resigned Employees files to be made seperate and to be Monitored by Auditors time to time. Payrole to be manually checked & verified. Communications within Departments and to the Banks also to be Recorded & Reviewed periodically.  

Follow                                 .

Activation of mechanisms to track and control led to the finishing