Over 7,000 retired employees still on active payroll

The Audit Service special exercise to unearth ghost names from government payroll has uncovered a fresh set of 7,107 persons over the retirement age of 60, who are still on the active payroll. This is apart from the 3,200 ghost names that have so far been identified and deleted, and another 2,700 duplicated/multiple ones which have been recently identified for deletion.

Mr Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey, Minister of Information and Presidential Affairs who announced this in Accra on Monday, said this has helped retrieve 1.6 billion cedis in unearned/unauthorised salaries and saved the country 3.8 billion cedis.

Speaking at the opening of a five-day seminar on management skills for 25 middle level staff of the audit service, he said 1.2 billion cedis has also been saved from the duplicated/multiple names, bringing the total savings under the first and second phases of the exercise to 6.4 billion cedis.

The Assembly of English Speaking African Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (AFROSAI-E), a regional grouping of the International Organisations of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI) organised the seminar.

Mr Obetsebi-Lamptey said as government grappled with the task of ensuring the country's economic well being, the challenge of the Audit Service was crucial to empower its staff to fully discharge the constitutional responsibility of being the watchdog of public accounts.

He said a first class audit service was crucial in the pursuance of the government's crusade of zero tolerance of corruption. "An efficient audit service, scrupulously performing its pre-expenditure and post expenditure auditing can save the country the billions of cedis which are annually lost through white collar crimes and careless administration of public funds."

He said the creditable performances of the service in United Nations assignments were not being translated at home, adding, "We wish to see the same diligence in work ethics and professionalism in the output of the Audit Service at home." "The question is how come financial malfeasance escapes the scrutiny of our auditors; is it inefficiency or collusion?" he asked.

Mr Edward Dua-Agyeman, Acting Auditor General said it was the first time a seminar was being organised in the country to benefit several staff members saying, "the past training programmes of the service had been geared towards promotion examinations and interviews to the detriment of individual staff training needs."

He said it was for this reason that the service sought the assistance of AFROSAI to organise the seminar in which preference had been given to those with an aptitude for and interest in training their colleagues.