Central Equatoria State is screening ghost names from government’s pay-roll, an official has announced.

The state Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, Juma David Augustine, said they will send the list to the state anti-corruption commission for action.

He says some government officials add names of employees who do not exist in their pay sheets, and receive their salaries at the end of every month.

“I have cases of people who have a whole page of a pay sheet, someone getting a salary for all the people on the page and you wonder where they are taking this money,” Mr Augustine told Eye Radio.

He added that those corrupt officials are going to be held accountable.

“It’s good we know their names, where they work, where they stay; what right have you got to take salary of 10 or 20 people as an individual for more than six years?”

Mr. Augustine says his ministry is introducing an electronic pay-roll system to address the issue of ghost workers.

The ministry formed a screening committee two weeks ago to assess the names of the ghost-workers in the pay-rolls of all the six counties of the state. These include Juba and Yei Municipal Council.

The system has been used by the national and other state governments to flush out ghost names.

A probe into national police service in 2013 uncovered over 11,000 fake names on the payroll.

Officials said the clean-out saved the government $9 million a month.

In 2014, South Sudan was ranked the 5^th most corrupt country of the 173 nations included in the annual Corruption Perceptions Index as published by Transparency International.