The Presidential Initiative on Continuous Audit (PICA) was established by President Muhammadu Buhari in 2016 as a standing inter-agency mechanism rather than a time-limited commission, designed to conduct ongoing real-time audit of the federal government's payroll and financial systems across all Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs). It was placed under the supervision of the Minister of Finance and operated with Dr. Mohammed Dikwa as its Secretary/Head. PICA's core mandate was to clean the federal payroll of ghost workers and other irregularities, leverage the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS), and institute continuous rather than periodic audit checks.
PICA began publishing findings from July 2016. By July of that year, Dikwa disclosed that the initiative had identified payroll discrepancies of ₦5.7 billion per month across MDAs—meaning annual leakage from ghost workers, double-salary recipients, and retired personnel continuing to draw pay approached ₦68.4 billion annually. By May 2018, PICA announced that over 50,000 erroneous payroll entries had been identified and removed from federal payroll systems, that approximately 800 ex-employees had been stopped from fraudulently drawing salaries, and that at least 400 individuals had been collecting two salaries from different MDAs simultaneously. The State House, in official communications, credited PICA with payroll savings exceeding ₦200 billion over the first two years of operation.
PICA's work intersected with the Whistle-blower Policy announced by Finance Minister Kemi Adeosun in December 2016, under which members of the public and civil servants could report financial irregularities for a percentage reward. By March 2018, the government reported that 534 whistle-blower cases had been investigated, yielding ₦145 billion in recovered funds. PICA operated continuously as a permanent executive initiative rather than producing a single consolidated public report; its findings were communicated through official press releases, ministerial statements to the National Assembly, and State House announcements. Critics noted that while payroll cleaning was demonstrably valuable, PICA's mandate did not extend to procurement fraud, contract inflation, or revenue leakage in parastatals such as NNPC—areas where losses dwarfed payroll irregularities. PICA's institutional continuity beyond the Buhari administration remained uncertain.