Gov’t saved GH¢433 million from removal of ‘ghost workers’

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has revealed that through a payroll audit conducted by the Ministry of Finance in the last two months, some 26,589 workers’ salaries have been suspended from the April 2017 payroll.

According to President Akufo-Addo, “These "workers" have not come forward to be biometrically verified by SSNIT, despite numerous calls by the Controller and Accountant General to do so. The idea of biometric verification is essentially to isolate ghost names from the payroll.”

The cost of maintaining these 26,589 names on government payroll, the President stated, is GH¢36,166,203 per month, implying that “government stands to save the country over GH¢433 million on this year’s budget alone by this exercise.”

President Akufo-Addo made this known on Monday, May 1, 2017, when he delivered his May Day address to workers, at the Independence Square, in Accra.

In addition to the biometric verification of workers, President Akufo-Addo reiterated that other efforts aimed at cleaning the payroll are being undertaken by government.

These include a new payment system that will integrate the GHIPSS payment platform for salaries to be paid directly to workers without any manual intervention, as has always been the case. This, he added, will be implemented on a test basis this month and envisaged to cover finally all workers in June 2017.

“SSNIT has also been asked to create a separate database for the Controller, by biometrically registering close to two hundred thousand CAP30 workers. Government payroll will now have a direct interface with this and the existing database, thus reducing payroll fraud to the barest minimum. This will provide a complete end-to-end visibility of the entire payroll system, while having a seamless integration between payroll cost and the government’s general ledger,” the President said.

He stressed that “if we are to pay workers well, we must do at least two things: get rid of ghost ones and enhance the efficiency of genuine ones.”

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