Cameroon squares up to its payroll fraud conundrum with biometric verification

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Biometric Update | Over the years, Cameroon’s public service has seen embarrassing proportions of payroll fraud which have had a heavy toll on the country’s struggling economy. This is a phenomenon the government has taken measures to tackle since 1994, with no big results to show for.

Now, the Ministry of Public Service and Administrative Reforms (MINFOPRA), has introduced a new workforce management solution with fingerprint biometrics which it hopes will effectively catch payroll thieves and streamline how the files of public servants are managed during and after their time in service.

AIGLES, as the new system is called, has been introduced as a replacement for the old payroll and civil service personnel management systems dubbed SIGIPES first created 30 years ago, as well as the ANTILOPE system. The government admits that these have all proven to be hugely ineffective as the state has continued to lose big sums of money to payroll fraud every year while the management of the public service remains largely paper-based. It is expected that sometime next year, the new system will fully replace the decades old SIGIPES IT platform, ushering in a new era in the country’s payroll and public service human resource management.

What is the AIGLES biometric software?

AIGLES is the French acronym for Application Informatique de Gestion Logique des Effectifs et de la Solde, which is roughly translated into English as Computer Software for the Logical Management of Personnel and Payroll.

The system is supplied by SIMAC, a Tunisian IT solutions company founded in 1984 and specialized in a wide range of software solutions for payroll and personal management in public administration. It is working in collaboration with a Cameroonian partner, Afreetech, a company which offers consultancy for digital transformation projects. The deal will run for two years at a cost of approximately $7.8 million.

In an interview in July, Cameroon’s Public Service Minister, Joseph Le, described AIGLES as “a unique and integrated platform that combines personnel and payroll management, centralizes data, reduces redundancies and improves administrative transparency.”

SIMAC which is part of the SCET Tunisia group is deploying its flagship OpenPRH software for the AIGLES project, designed for payroll and human resource management. The solution, which is built with English and French as default languages, has been used for payroll and human resource management projects in countries like Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Republic of Congo. SIMAC helped modernize the Congolese government’s human resource management system through a project that was launched in May 2021.  OpenPRH is a secure and interoperable software that allows for the integration of biometric terminals. SIMAC says it has executed over 300 projects in over 20 countries. It has STB Bank, one of the biggest banks in Tunisia, among its clientele.

The Public Service Minister described the project as a change of paradigm which reflects Cameroon’s “firm commitment to modernizing the management of the public administration, and providing a more performant and proactive public service.”

“It will be based on paperless document flow, meaning that physical documents will no longer circulate from one position to another, and in some cases, they will disappear completely. In addition, a biometric system will be deployed nationwide to check that employees are present at their job positions,” said Le.

The biometric modality is fingerprints, and the system will harmonize existing public service personnel data from all government ministries and agencies into one central repository where users will confirm their identities with biometrics.

Per the minister, the name AIGLES – which is the French word for Eagle – is inspired by the bird’s qualities of strength, vigilance and precision, which denote the level to which the software intends to raise good governance in the Cameroonian public administration, particularly in terms of workforce and payroll management.

He explained that the system, among other things, includes a biometric attendance feature which aims at checking the presence of public employees using biometric clocks and attendance machines to be installed in public offices – a process which will entail calculating the actual working hours of public servants to be reflected in their monthly pay. It also has digital archiving and data protection functionalities to protect the personal data of civil servants.

According to the Public Service Minister, a pilot for the implementation of the new system has already been successfully completed. It involved 236 staff from 37 different public administration offices, and the idea was to test 13 of the 14 designed modules already integrated in the software. In the course of the pilot, the files of employees were processed, with the results reflecting positive feedback.

Among its many functions, the new system will also enable the government master its workforce and wage bill, digitize human resources management processes of the state which will provide authorities with a critical decision-making tool, enable regular and effective monitoring of the presence and assiduity of state workers at their work stations, and act as an innovative platform for state employees and pensioners to digitally track their career and pension files.

With its extensive functionalities, AILGLES, which will also be interoperable with all public institutions, has been described by the government as “a new generation human resource management tool” to be used for managing the entire career cycle of state works – from recruitment to the termination of their entitlements.

Curbing the cost of payroll fraud

Despite enormous efforts deployed by the government of Cameroon to tackle payroll fraud in the last three decades, the problem has remained pervasive across sectors. Audits and censuses for civil servants in the past years have found that several billions of FCFA (millions of US$) are lost to ghost workers annually.

A report published recently by the National Anti-Corruption Commission (CONAC) shows that fraud in Cameroon’s public service remains high. Per the report, the state lost a total of FCFA 114 billion (US$189 million) to corruption, including through fraud in the public service, in 2023. The figure shows a meteoric rise in the country’s financial losses attributed to corrupt practices in one year. CONAC reported just over FCFA 4 billion (US$6.6 million) lost by the state to all forms of corruption in 2022.

Two months ago, the Ministry of Finance released results of an audit carried out between 2010 and 2021 which revealed that the state lost at least $5 million to pensions fraud annually, within that period because pension earners in the army and police defrauded the system using documents like fake birth certificates. Sources at the Ministry of Finance estimate that the state lost around FCFA 35 billion (US$57.6 million) over the eleven-year period audited.

A similar audit report was unveiled in 2020, when the government said it identified nearly 10,000 civil servants who had been receiving undeserved salaries and benefits, costing the state an estimated FCFA 30 billion (US$ 50 million) annually.

President Paul Biya also recognized the massive problem of public service and payroll fraud in a recent presidential circular issued on October 23 which contains guidelines on the preparation of the country’s 2025 state budget. He urged the Prime Minister and his cabinet to multiply efforts aimed at combatting these ills which cost the government billions every year.

A better managed and monitored payroll

With the AIGLES system in place, officials say things will never be the same again. This new software, whose progressive deployment started in June, is seen as a major step toward stopping the actions of white-collar thieves who are hurting the country’s economic growth.

The Director General of the Budget in the Ministry of Finance, Cyrill Edou Alo’o told a Public Service Ministry news magazine in July that with the new software, “the payroll will be much better monitored and managed.”

Alo’o said apart from cutting the time that was hitherto needed to calculate the salaries of civil servants and facilitating the calculation of payments for pension earners, AIGLES will also be extremely instrumental is sanitizing the payroll.

“Another advantage is automatic cleansing. We’ll have fewer cases of double service numbers” he said, adding that the software will enable authorities easily identify those who have either abandoned their duty posts or have died, but have their salaries and benefits still being paid into their accounts.

“We can assure everyone that the new system, which is currently being deployed and whose commissioning phase began on June 19, 2024, is a trustworthy system and it’s up to the challenge.”

Lotfi Mrad, a representative of SIMAC, the company providing the software, describes it as “an important project for the state of Cameroon” which aims to enable the country have a paperless administration.

“We have gathered observations from representatives of many ministries who have seen the integration of various modules and tested the functionality of the application for themselves,” Mrad told the same publication.

He added that apart from deploying the system for MINFOPRA’s test servers, they have also provided training for mobile teams and personnel of all public administrations involved in the process.

Apart from the whopping sums of money the Cameroon government is expected to save from paying ghost workers or irregular staff, the new software will also enable authorities to save time in administrative processes through expedited results. It is also expected to help bring down the cost of human resource management, centralize and facilitate secure data flows among government agencies, generate high-quality reporting and statistics, enable exchange of data through the interoperability feature, and combat fraud and abuse, among other things.

African countries find favour in biometrics to curb payroll fraud

Like in Cameroon, payroll fraud is a cankerworm in many African countries. With many of these countries involved in digital transformation projects, sanitizing their civil service management systems is nothing short of an imperative.

In the same light, development partners and organizations such as the World Bank have proposed the use of robust transparency, anti-corruption and accountability systems such as those based on generative artificial intelligence and biometrics to counter the disturbing payroll fraud trend.

From Equatorial Guinea, to Kenya, Nigeria, South Sudan, Zambia to Zimbabwe, governments are turning to biometrics to clean their public service payroll systems in order to save up money that’s being lost, for useful development projects, especially at a time when these countries are racing to meet their Sustainable Development Goals.