DEFINITION
Ghost Employee
A ghost employee is a payroll record that receives payment without a corresponding real, currently employed worker. The category covers fictitious employees, duplicate records for one person, retained leavers, and no-show workers.
Ghost employees are detected by reconciliation rather than by any single test. Payroll is compared against systems that should independently corroborate employment: HR master data, badge or system access logs, email provisioning, and organisational hierarchy.
A record paid by payroll but absent from all corroborating systems is the strongest indicator. Two employee identifiers sharing one bank account, tax identifier, or contact detail is the second.