Over 7,000 government employees were unaccounted for on government payroll system, according to the Auditor-General’s Department.
The report emanated after a nationwide enumeration exercise embarked on by the Auditor-General to audit government payroll system.
The figure, when quantified into monitory, runs into millions of Ghana cedis annually which goes into the pockets of what the department termed as “unaccounted for employment” normally refers to as ghost names.
The Deputy Auditor-General, George Swanzy Windful, who revealed this in an interview with Onua TV’s Maakye on Wednesday explained that “normally, we do them [audit of payroll] in isolations. We do them in districts and regions so we did not have the national picture”.
He said “when we planned of doing this, the Ministry of Finance also realized it was a good thing because it was going to help them and so we did that in collaboration with the Ministry of Finance”.
Mr. Windful said they informed all the municipal, metropolitan and district assemblies about the over 7,000 that were affected, “but unfortunately, they could not account for them and that means they were unaccounted for employees”.
He noted that because people think it is government employment, the zeal to work and unearth some of these things in the public sector has not been encouraging compare to the private sector.
He said the exercise would put various managers of human resource in state institutions on their toes to work and know that their actions and in-actions are causing the nation.
The Deputy Auditor-General said “the risk is everywhere. Even if one person does not deserve to be on the payroll of any government institution, that person should not be on”.
Mr. Winful added, “it is condemnable because we see these risks everywhere and what is important is for the respective human resource departments of government institutions to sit up”.
By Kweku Antwi-Otoo|3news.com|Ghana