WORKING FOR YOU FRESH INFORMATION reaching DAILY GUIDE indicates that more government officials and private individuals are being picked up by the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) over payroll fraud. The suspects have been recruiting people, and presenting them as government workers in order to defraud the state, despite attempts to clear the payroll of ghost names. The BNI, in recent times, has been making regular visits to the Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) and some financial institutions including banks where arrests have been made. DAILY GUIDE learnt that the nationwide operations have led to the offices of the BNI flooding with detainees, with some of them already processed for court. Some of the suspects from the MDAs and key financial institutions have been arrested and detained for days without their relatives knowing their whereabouts. The report about the arrest of three officials of the Ghana Education Service (GES) and a bank official at the Agona East GES directorate, together with a syndicate at the Controller and Accountant-General’s Department for using fake teachers’ identities to withdraw monies from dubious accounts was just a tip of the iceberg. They include Douglas Kporbatsi and Castro Nkum, Head of Human Resource Department and Administrative Officer respectively at GES and a bank manager Samuel Appiah. An accountant at the Controller and Accountant-General’s Department Isaac Amoakwah-Boadu, in charge of government workers’ salaries in the Central Region, was also arrested by the BNI as the leader of the syndicate, forging documents for individuals to pose as staff on GES payroll, and withdrawing monies from the state treasury. An Inter-Personal Payroll (IPPD) Coordinator, Paul Dzentu is at large. They were alleged to have fraudulently withdrawn over GH¢175,000 from the state kitty using fake teachers’ documents and names of semi-literate persons, some of whom could hardly read or write. DAILY GUIDE learnt that the alleged fraudsters were nabbed as a result of the ongoing biometric registration of government workers in which their fingerprints and other unique data was taken. Some of the alleged payroll fraudsters have already been dragged to court for prosecution. The modus operandi of the suspects, according to information gathered, was that they recruited persons and presented them as teachers in order to bloat the payroll. They then obtained Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) registration numbers for such imposters and passed them through the biometric registration exercise at the Ministry of Finance for them to appear on the IPPD at the Controller and Accountant General’s Department as government workers. DAILY GUIDE learnt that the payroll fraud is widespread at the various state institutions where several millions of cedis are being paid into ghost accounts on monthly bases for dubious characters to withdraw. -Daily Guide
Posted on: Wed, 17 Jul 2013 09:58:47 +0000
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