Government Payroll

The Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) and the Controller and Accountant General’s Department (CAGD) jointly commenced corruption risk assessment and investigation into suspected corruption and corruption-related offences in respect of Government Payroll Administration. The assessment and investigation are especially aimed at isolating and removing the names of non-existent, ineligible, and undeserving persons from government payroll, recovering wrongful payments and unearned salaries, prosecuting persons suspected to be culpable for any offences, and the institution and implementation of internal controls in respect of payroll processing and payment of salaries.

The investigation and assessment cover all employees on government payroll and their respective banks and other deposit taking financial institutions. The investigation and assessment are being carried out in two phases. Phase I covers Ghana Education Service and Ghana Health Service. Phase II covers Ministries, Departments, all other Agencies and Metropolitan/Municipal/District Assemblies (MDAs/MMDAs).

The Government of Ghana payroll business process is intended to ensure that only eligible employees are paid deserving salaries. Two key quality assurance activities form the foundation of the process, viz – 

i.    the validation of and by management units to confirm that staff are at post and have earned the assigned amount; and

ii.    the payment of salaries into bank accounts of employees as designated by employees on the payroll.

The robustness of the intended quality assurance activities has been seriously challenged in the past few years with the reckoning that some persons who are deceased, or retired, or vacated their posts are being validated as alive and at post and are being paid as if they are at post and performing designated duties.

The imperativeness of a wider and more rigorous review of government payroll data became obvious. This birthed the ongoing collaborative investigation and assessment by the OSP and CAGD.

Two major activities are being undertaken by the OSP and CAGD, viz – 

i.    reconciliation of staff paid on the government payroll system and the nominal rolls of MDAs/MMDAs; and
ii.    confirmation of the account holders’ names on the final payroll payment report with their respective banks.

To facilitate the roll-out of the investigation and assessment throughout the country, a pilot exercise was carried out in the Northern Region (covering educational institutions under Ghana Education Service and the Tamale Teaching Hospital) by a joint team, comprising investigators, tracers, and assessors from the OSP and selected staff of the Payroll Processing Directorate of CAGD between December 2023 and April 2024. On 20 May 2024, the OSP and the CAGD published an investigation report on the pilot exercise.

The report stated that the team investigated and assessed 1265 persons represented on Government payroll and flagged as high-risk of suspected corruption and corruption-related activities. The data of the flagged persons were transmitted to the respective banks, which were directed by the Special Prosecutor to promptly withold the salaries of the affected persons commencing from January 2024. The team evaluated and analysed the nominal roll data of the target institutions in respect of the affected persons. Subsequently, the field unit of the team carried out field investigation to ascertain the status of the affected persons.

The joint team observed that the payroll system in the Northern Region (covering educational institutions under Ghana Education Service and the Tamale Teaching Hospital) is characterised by an alarming number of unauthorised and inactive validators. Indeed, most of the management units were found to be validating persons with unauthorised and inactive validators’ credentials. That is to say, the credentials of deceased and retired validators were being actively used in the validation process. Then again, transferred validators were purporting to engage in validation with their inactive previous credentials.

It was also observed that transferred and released staff were being validated by their previous management units, creating the clear danger of unattested active or continuous engagement by the respective institutions. Also, some schools had no management units to validate staff. The persons affiliated with the schools were either being validated by their previous affiliated schools or were being offloaded to the nearest schools for validation. This created grave problems of unreliability of the validation process, especially in respect of the status of the nominal rolls of the district education directorates and the monitoring of actual attendance to duty.

In one instance, it was discovered that a non-existent entity was being passed off as functional primary school; and the non-existent contrived entity was represented as staffed and the purported staff were being validated monthly and being paid salaries. Further, some headteachers and heads of units were validating some persons whose whereabouts were unknown to them. Egregiously, some validators were validating persons who were, to the knowledge of the validators, deceased, retired or vacated their posts.

Out of the sampled high-risk number of 1265 persons represented on the payroll, the joint investigation and assessment cleared 1020 persons as regularly validated. 

The OSP and CAGD are engaged in enhanced investigation into the educational institutions under Ghana Education Service in the Northern Region and the Tamale Teaching Hospital aimed at the prosecution of persons who promoted the non-existent school; validated deceased, untraceable, and retired persons and persons who have vacated their posts.

The OSP is taking steps to recover unearned salaries paid in respect of deceased, untraceable, and retired persons and persons who have vacated their posts. Further, the OSP and CAGD are engaged in the process of directing internal control mechanisms in respect of payroll processing to substantially reduce the incidence of the processing and payment of unearned salaries. The OSP and CAGD would proceed by extending the investigation to the remaining fifteen regions of the Republic under Phase I of the exercise.