Auditor General on heels of age cheats; Moves to make culprits ‘vomit’ salaries

Beginning January 2019, the Auditor General’s office will embark on an exercise to go after workers, who have deliberately tampered with their dates of birth, to enable them to continue to stay in employment in state institutions, even though they have technically reached the retirement age.

According to the Auditor General, Mr Daniel Yaw Domelevo, his office has already obtained the database on some suspects and they will be going after them in 2019.

He said the database on the suspects have been obtained from Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT), the Driver and Vehicular Licensing Authority (DVLA) where the suspects procured some services and left copies of their real dates of birth there.

The exercise, according to Mr Domelevo would also ensure that workers in the employment of the state, particularly in subvented institutions entered with the correct qualifications and certificates and were doing the right jobs according to their qualifications.

This, according to him was to help clean the payroll system and enable the Audit Service to properly document the database gathered from various government agencies.

“Early next year, we are going to start with the subvented agencies such as Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, the universities, all the subvented institutions, the Police, the Army, we are going to all of them to be sure that if you were recruited as a policeman, did you bring the right certificates and that is what you are doing,” Mr Domelevo said in an interview with Radio Ghana, which was monitored by Graphic Online.

He added: 

“And we have a lot of database we have collected on people, they don’t know. Like I was talking about age, people don’t know, its very unfortunate that Ghanaians lie about their age.”

“They forget when they got employment, they reduced their age, they’ve forgotten that they have a social security number and there is an age they gave. They have forgotten that they went for driving license and they gave another age there.”

"So we have collected all these database which tells us, so we already have the suspects, we know some people we already suspect them because the database we have tell us that they have lied severally," he added.

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Mr Domelevo added: "So at the end, we are going to ask you, tell us which of these dates are the correct ones. Anybody who joined the payroll wrongly, we think its a problem. Let me say something which I think is very disturbing, its when people have gotten fake certificates to be in professional positions like in hospitals."

He said somebody is operating in a hospital and his certificate is fake, "I hope you also know the effect of someone teaching as a professional teacher meanwhile he doesn’t have the certificate."

"So these are some of the things we have to do so to clean the payroll."

The Auditor General said the names of such culprits would not just be taken out, "its not just deletion, it is coming with a certificate of disallowance and then surcharge and I want to plead with Ghanaians, if that happens, don’t come to my office because the constitution does not give me authority to revoke my certificates under Clause 15 of Article 187, it says its only a High Court which can put the certificate away."

"So once I surcharge you, you must go to the High Court and face my lawyers, you win your case before you come back," he added.

Writer's email: enoch.frimpong@graphic.com.gh 

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