The Controller and Accountant General’s Department (CAGD) is insisting that there are currently no ghost names on the government payroll.
According to the Department, the Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) should be blamed for any ghost names found.
The Deputy Accountant General in charge of Audit and Investigation, Michael Gyamfi on the Citi Breakfast Show said: “…to the best of my knowledge, I do not think there are any ghost names on the payroll…. Every month, we send this to them to verify so if there are ghost names, then it is coming from the MDAs.”
[contextly_sidebar id=”MHcrSe8H7sc25vSG5nhRdOo0b2jbTnXh”]Policy think tank IMANI Ghana in a statement said it has intercepted a document incriminating the CAGD in the payment of salaries to ghost names on the government payroll.
The ghost names included public sector workers who are on leave-without-pay and workers on transfer who are receiving double salaries.
The statement said: “If there were two institutions that had perfected the art of making nonsense of all the reform efforts firmly established by the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission to rein in the haemorrhaging wage bill, it is certainly the Controller and Accountant General’s Department and the National Service Secretariat.”
The Department has vehemently denied these accusations, describing them as full of “factual inaccuracies.”
Mr. Gyamfi explained that every head of MDA is mandated to ensure names reported on their payroll to the CAGD are names of their employees.
Every month, the CAGD generates the pay report to the respective MDAs for verification.
But according to Mr. Gyamfi, so far, no head of an MDA “has ever reported that there are unknown names on their payroll…At no point in time has an MDA reported that there are strange names on their payroll which means that every name that is on the payroll as of now belongs to one or two of the MDAs.”
He argued that if there are any ghost names, “then it might be people who have probably vacated, but due to delays in deleting their names from the payroll are being paid.”
According to him, the National Administration Regulation stipulates that heads of departments are to notify the banks immediately it detects that there has been a delay in the deletion of names of people who may have died, changed jobs or were in school.
This is to enable the banks return those monies back to the government chest and Mr. Gyamfi insists that the heads of MDAs “are doing this religiously.”
On the generation of SSNIT numbers and payment of SSNIT contributions, Mr. Gyamfi admitted that sometimes, workers who are employed in the public sector do not get their SSNIT numbers early but was quick to add that “in the course of time, these numbers are submitted and we fix them on the payroll.”
“We generate report to SSNIT for all SSNIT deductions. SSNIT is able to credit the names that we submit to them. They have not come back to tell us that the names that we submit to them, they have not been able to locate and allocate to them,” he remarked.
He stressed that all the names his outfit send to SSNIT “are genuine employees whose deductions are being credited to them by SSNIT.”
By: Efua Idan Osam/citifmonline.com/Ghana
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