Audit service surprised by the rate of fraud in the public service

By
Afedzi Abdullah, RNG

Cape Coat, July 28
NAG – National Payroll Audit and Staff Validation Exercise in progress
revealed a worrying trend of the widespread use of fake certificates and
promotional letters from some public workers to receive wages.

million. George Winful,
Deputy Auditor General and head of the census exercise team, who has
the revelation at a press conference in Cape Coast on Friday expressed consternation
about the practice.

Subsequently, Heads
institutions and organizations were urged to be meticulous in their
recruitment of employees in the public service and also show an interest in
their HR records of high-risk officers in their
institutions

"Outside of
listing, we are also interested in knowing the authenticity of the
documents that are presented before us. Some of them become disturbing
trend, if the signals we are starting to see is something that is real,
so the heads of the institutions must be meticulous in the examination of their employees "
Mr. Winful said:

"We had
case where some people have used other people's certificates for
employment. You can imagine if such a person is in the clbadroom, so maybe
this could be the reason for poor results in high schools "
says

Mr. Winful said
information received from whistleblowers has shown that other institutions
who were not part of the census exercise, engaged in a similar exercise
convenient.

"We met
situations where some people are trying to take wages in the positions that they have
not reached because they falsified this or that, "he said.

million. Winful said that
held received information from people about fake cases
certificates in some public institutions and stated that they would be studied
and those found guilty would be punished accordingly.

He said that there was
been cases where people brought promotion letters and photocopies by email but
indicated that these were some of the high-risk issues that could compromise the
system.

Henceforth, he said
only original copies of the promotional letters would be accepted for the exercise
to ensure that the information provided was authentic.

He said
situations where people submit photocopies, their institutions need to be able to
to provide a complete list of promoters with appropriate letters to
confirm the authenticity of
information provided

M. Winful rented
decision of the Comptroller and the Accountant General to sanction the
exceeded their personal compensation budget by adding that "all these anomalies
leads to an increase in the wage bill of the respective institutions
probably leads to budget overruns "

He warned the chiefs of
institutions to refrain from selling vacancies to people who
have the certificates required to be in that position by adding that, whoever
gets on the payroll the government has to
go through the process of engagement.

The Ghana Audit
The service and the controller and accountant – Department of General Services have started
National Exercise Payroll Verification and Validation Staff on Tuesday, July
17 in Central Region to clean up the bloated payroll.

GNA