GuardGhost

When governments and aid programmes disburse money, real people are supposed to receive it: a teacher’s salary, a pensioner’s monthly transfer, a refugee family’s cash assistance. Sometimes the money lands. Sometimes the name on the list does not match a real person. Ghost workers, duplicate beneficiaries, and inflated registries divert billions every year from the people they were intended for.

GuardGhost is a Dutch detection platform that helps governments, humanitarian agencies, and development NGOs check the integrity of their disbursement registries before funds are released. The platform produces risk scores, investigation shortlists, and assurance reports that survive donor scrutiny. Alongside the platform, VERAS Foundation is being established as an independent Dutch foundation that will govern and score the underlying standard, modelled on rating agencies such as Moody’s.

The standard is designed to give donors a credible basis for conditionality decisions and a comparable view of disbursement integrity across the institutions they fund.

Connect with them for:

• Independent integrity checks on a specific registry:
  • We run focused assessments on a single payroll, beneficiary register, or pension roll. The output is risk scores, an investigation shortlist, and an assurance report. We are sector-agnostic: the same methodology applies whether the disbursing entity is a ministry, a humanitarian agency, or a development NGO.
• Practitioner conversations:
  • We work directly with NGO programme leads, government finance officers, and donor staff who live the disbursement integrity problem. Whether you are scoping an integrity assessment for an upcoming disbursement cycle or pressure-testing how an independent check would fit your organisation’s controls, we are interested in the conversation.
• Engagement with the VERAS standard:
  • VERAS Foundation is being established as an independent Dutch foundation that will govern and score a disbursement integrity standard, modelled on rating agencies such as Moody’s. The standard is anchored in PEFA on the government side and CHS on the humanitarian side, and applies the same methodology to ministries, humanitarian agencies, and development NGOs. We welcome practitioners and policy specialists with views on what an independent standard should and should not be, including donors thinking through how disbursement integrity should be reflected in conditionality and portfolio risk frameworks.