The Youth Employment Agency says it has deleted 16,839 “ghost names” from its payroll.
This follows an audit of YEA’s Human Resource base which revealed that some of the names on the payroll were for non-existence workers, while others had fraudulent appointments.
According to the Agency, the deletion of the names has saved it more than GH¢ 20million.
Justice Frimpong, acting Chief Executive Officer of YEA, at a news conference in Accra today, said the audit was necessitated after some discrepancies were detected on the beneficiary payroll.
He explained that the audit exercise noticed huge arrears as a result of non-payment of some beneficiaries since May 2016, which led to the suspension of payment of allowances to beneficiaries.
Mr. Frimpong said the audit, which included a head-count, found that although some of the affected beneficiaries had vacated post, they were still earning allowances.
“Some of the affected persons also had no appointment letters while some of the letters did not have signature of the CEOs.
“Some letters had faked signatures of CEOs and beneficiaries on a number of the schemes were also found to be above the YEA’s age requirement,” Justice Frimpong said.
As part of measures to ensure sanity in the system, he expressed his commitment towards the implementation of the recommendations of the audit report which includes a call to strengthen the internal control mechanisms.
Among these control mechanisms, he said pre-monthly validations would be introduced which would require validations before allowances are paid.
“All payments will have to pass through the internal audit for pre-auditing before payment is effected,” he said.
By: Samuel Mingle/adrdaily.com
