We’ve not used the right approach in the past to eliminate ghost names on payroll – Oduro Osae

Head of the Internal Audit Agency, Dr Eric Oduro Osae has said that some heads of public institutions do not take their time to go through the public payroll.

He said investigations into ghosts names on payroll will be extensive.

Speaking on the Sunrise show with Alfred Ocansey on 3FM Wednesday August 17, he said “Heads of public institutions don’t take their time to go through the public payroll. Nobody will be left out of the case during investigations.

“I think we have not used the right approach in the past to eliminate ghost names in the public sector payroll.”

His comments come at a time the Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia has indicated that a process to match biometric details of workers in the national identity system at the National Identification Authority (NIA) and same details at the Controller and Accountant General’s Department (CAGD) has detected over 148,000 workers with multiple identities.

“It may just mean that, maybe, they have not just registered for the Ghana Card. That is the optimistic assumption,” Dr Bawumia said on Tuesday, August 16 while speaking at this year’s Internal Audit Agency Conference in Accra.

He further indicated that a report will be produced after the process is completed and those found to be cheating the system will be made to face the law.

He said the process is part of efforts to employ digitisation to rid the system of corruption occasioned by the supposed ghost names.

“Just last week, the Controller and Accountant General completed an exercise with the National Identification Authority where we are matching employees on the Controller and Accountant database with the Ghana Card ID and they just completed the first phase of the work last week and we have found that there are 533 people on Controller and Accountant General payroll who have multiple identities,” he said.

“In all cases of multiple identities, the employees have more than one Controller and Accountant General’s Department account with different employee numbers. Some have three employee numbers.

“The data also shows that 148,060 employees out of the 601,000 plus employees on the database that did not match anyone on the national identification register, the Ghana Card.”

It was at this point that the Vice President assumed these workers may not have registered yet for their Ghana Cards.

“It is also possible that some of those without these matching biometrics could have multiple employee accounts but we would have to see.”

He, therefore, served notice that these defaulting workers will be fished out.

“We will get to the bottom of this and I know that we will rely a lot on the Internal Audit Agency as we are doing to get to the bottom of the corruption that is there with ghost workers on our payroll and a report will of course be made to the prosecution authorities.”