The Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta has admitted there were some names wrongfully expunged from government’s mechanised payroll as part of government’s bid to rid it of ghost names.
Speaking at the National Policy Forum in Accra today [Monday], Mr. Ofori-Atta explained that the exercise to clean the payroll was necessary to protect the public purse, but was quick to apologise persons whose names were mistakenly deleted.
“…We did an exercise recently in which quite a number of people were taken out of the payroll. We’ve had some remarks from some unions, but the real question for all of us in the country is that we know that there is some rot in there, we know we need to take some action and in the process of taking the action a few wrong eggs will be broken and we should apologise for that.”
“Going through the numbers I actually found one or two of the Directors at Ministry of Finance have been included in that list they don’t exist. So there are mistakes,” he added.
The Minister of Finance in April directed that names of 26, 589 public sector workers be removed from government’s payroll noting that those who were to be affected had not been registered on the new Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) biometric system.
The Akufo-Addo administration has committed to cleaning out the public payroll and riding it of ghost names and it said the directive resulted from the identification of close to 50, 000 ghost names on the payroll and Pensions Registry.
The exercise is expected to save the country some GHc 35 million in payroll cost on a monthly basis or a total of over GHc 250 million in 2017 alone.
Ministry had assured that those workers whose salaries may have been mistakenly blocked would be rectified and paid on the 15th of May.
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(Via: CitiFM Online Ghana)
