Senior fellow Alan Gelb was mentioned in a Slate article on biometric identification.
From the Article
Call 2011 the year of the biometric ID. Once the territory of high-security enclaves and spy novels, identification by iris scan, fingerprint, and other unique physical features has now become de rigueur around the world—especially in India, whose program to ID every citizen has been the subject of almost giddy reports about the technology’s potential to democratize society. The New York Times described India’s biometric database as “building real citizenship” for the first time. Wired emphasized how biometrics can finally bring the disenfranchised into the formal economy. The New Yorker detailed the necessity of IDs for the poor in accessing formal savings opportunities.
But entirely underemphasized is another major upside of biometric IDs and the shift to electronic payments: solving the ghost-worker problem.
For decades, the developing world has tried to bust ghost workers: make-believe police, teachers, and bureaucrats furtively planted into payrolls by corrupt government staffers, particularly in remote areas. These fictional “workers” bear the names of infants, the deceased, or real adults who simply aren’t employees. This long-running scam drains millions of dollars each year from already strained public coffers in countries like India, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Afghanistan.
Waste, fraud, and abuse are often blamed on too much central government. But ghost-worker scams illustrate the opposite problem: Ghost scams flourish in areas characterized by decentralization—where cash payment systems for government salaries, pensioners, and welfare recipients are particularly hard to monitor.
The scale of the problem can be jaw-dropping. In Zimbabwe, a recent examination reportedly revealed 75,273 ghost workers out of 188,019 employees from various ministries. Eliminating these phantom employees would save taxpayers more than $200 million annually. The potential savings are immense in a country where up to 80 cents for every dollar of government revenue goes to salaries.
Using biometric IDs instead of traditional paper documents can eliminate duplicate enrollments and guarantee that the actual payee receives the money, usually by employing fingerprint verification at pay points. These high-tech IDs have been used in at least 15 developing nations over the last decade for payments or money transfers. In June, Alan Gelb and Caroline Decker of the Center for Global Development estimated that at least 450 million people in developing countries have had their biometric information recorded, with that figure set to triple over the next five years.