An investigation into Ghana’s National Service Authority (NSA) has revealed that individuals as old as 80 and 90 years old have been fraudulently included on the scheme’s payroll.
Kwaku Krobea Asante, Programmes Manager at the Independent Journalism Project under the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), highlighted the scale of the issue.
“Ghost names in the sense that what the NSA tells us as the number of personnel is different from what they have in their data. Which data we believe eventually gets into the payroll and is paid. Now the government has come to confirm,” he said in a recent interview.
He detailed how the scheme has been manipulated, with some officials allegedly inserting non-existent individuals and even elderly people well beyond the eligible age into the system to siphon public funds.
“We see how they do this, how they pack the ghost names, which is what the story is trying to say. How they use over-age people, 80-year-olds and 90-year-olds to put their data in there. How they create fake index numbers in the name of universities so that they can justify them,” he explained.
In some cases, a single name was reportedly duplicated hundreds of times, further exposing the scale of the alleged fraud.
“Funny names popping up, a single name could be repeated 226 times—such a person has completed the same university, read the same programme, the same year, and been deployed.”
“A lot of odd happenings in the data, pointing to the fact that some people have intentionally done that,” Mr Asante told Channel One.
