The Auditor-General has indicted the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) Management Secretariat (LMS) for paying deceased beneficiaries, some of them up to eight years after their passing.
The audit also uncovered wrongful payments to unqualified persons, as well as overspending and poor record-keeping under the management of the LEAP programme, resulting in the country spending more than GH¢15.85 million between 2017 and 2022 on unqualified persons, including the deceased, instead of the real extremely poor and vulnerable people.
These are some of the key findings in the latest performance audit report of the Auditor-General on the management of LEAP, a social protection initiative introduced in 2008 by the government to offer financial assistance in the form of grants to extremely poor and vulnerable households to help alleviate their economic and social distress.
The report also indicted the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection (MoGCSP) and its agencies such as the LEAP Management Secretariat (LMS) and Social Protection Department (SPD) for their inability to efficiently manage the programme.
However, the LMS has denied all the accusations.
The secretariat said the management had deployed an efficient approach to implement the programme to support the extremely poor and vulnerable households.
Findings
For instance, the report found that the LMS paid cash grants to caregivers of deceased beneficiaries in one-member households, resulting in payments to 44 deceased beneficiaries, amounting to GH¢84,480 and representing 81 per cent of 54 beneficiaries on LEAP books found to have been deceased spanning three months to eight years.
However, the report was categorical that the LMS did not conduct reassessments of LEAP beneficiaries as required to be done every four years to graduate or exit beneficiaries even when their socio-economic statuses had improved.
That led to payments of GH¢396,620 to 170 beneficiaries who no longer qualified to be on the programme because their socio-economic status had improved.
The secretariat also did not adhere to fund utilisation guidelines and for that reason expended more funds on running the programme than allowed, resulting in excess spending of GH¢15.37 million which limits the programme’s ability to enrol more beneficiaries.
In addition, the ministry and SPD failed to keep appropriate records on funds expended under the programme.
The audit team assessed activities of the LMS in ensuring that only eligible beneficiaries were on the programme for the period 2017 to 2022 with a focus on removal of ineligible beneficiaries, graduation of beneficiaries, payment of cash grants to beneficiaries and accounting for expenditure incurred in running the programme.
Deceased beneficiaries
However, when the Daily Graphic contacted the Head of the LEAP Secretariat, Dr Myles Ongoh, in Accra last Tuesday, he totally denied any wrongdoing in the management of the programme.
He explained that, the programme had a well-structured strategy to ensure that deceased beneficiaries were deactivated from its database.
“It was for this reason that we have a case management unit; at the subnational level we have the district social welfare officers who are the frontline workers and so, anytime a beneficiary passes the information is collected and passed on to the respective official for the name of that household to be deactivated,” he said.
Dr Ongoh said as the report captured, if a case was reported, investigated and it was confirmed that a beneficiary in a one-member household had passed away, that household must be quarantined in the LEAP MIS and would no longer be accrued for during subsequent payments.
He stated that within the period of the performance audit, the programme had deactivated 281 deceased persons from its database.
The Head of LEAP Secretariat said the ministry through LMS had started implementing a strategy by dispatching teams during payment to visit homes of one-member households to find out if the eligible beneficiaries were still alive and if they had been receiving the money from the caregivers.
He explained that the strategy would be scaled up across the country to deal with one-member households whose eligible beneficiaries were dead, including the 44 households captured in the report.
Again, he said, the District Social Welfare Officers (DSWOs) and the Community Focal Persons (CFPs) had been tasked to monitor the activities of the beneficiary households and report any beneficiary who passed on to the Case Management Unit of LMS for the necessary investigation and quarantine where necessary.
Graduating beneficiaries
Dr Ongoh further stated that the management of LMS agreed with the findings of the Auditor-General and for that reason had already instituted actions to improve the situation.
He explained that the LMS recognised that the reassessment and recertification were crucial to the sustenance and credibility of the LEAP programme.
“The reassessment was the process of reviewing/evaluating the poverty status of all households on the LEAP programme by obtaining an updated poverty score for the LEAP households to determine which LEAP households are eligible to exit, remain (recertify) or graduate from the programme,” the Head of LEAP stated.
Dr Ongoh explained that such a measure would provide an opportunity to enrol households that had not been on the programme.
He added that per its design, the LEAP programme was expected to undertake reassessment every four years.
“However, the LEAP Management Secretariat and for that matter, the ministry since the inception of the programme in 2008 are unable to undertake this exercise until last year,” he said.
The Head of LEAP stated that the inability to undertake the reassessment was partly due to the associated political and economic issues as well as funding, given that the programme was capital intensive and required adequate liquidity.
Fortunately, Dr Ongoh said in 2022 the ministry granted approval for the secretariat to undertake its first-ever reassessment through a pilot project which ended in January 2023.
The decision to pilot was informed by various factors to learn lessons with regard to gauging public acceptance and anxiety and to inform the cost of a nationwide rollout.
He added that so far, the government had earmarked GH¢35 million for the reassessment of the programme in 44 districts across the country.
Fund utilisation guidelines
The Head of LEAP stated that the management of LEAP had deployed best cost management practices to control cost and to operate within the 10 per cent target.
However, Dr Ongoh said the continuous rise in inflation had caused a general increase in the prices of goods and services over the years, which had adversely impacted the cost of operation of the programme.
He said the operational expenses on payment, monitoring, targeting, enrolment, training, communication and case management had gone up over the period.
Dr Ongoh said despite the increase in the cost operations, the LEAP grant paid to beneficiaries had remained unchanged for the past eight years, rendering the 90 per cent to 10 per cent ratio unattainable.
“This is because, since 2015 the cash grants paid to each LEAP beneficiary has not been adjusted in line with the inflationary rates, while the increasing operational costs to render service for the beneficiaries have increased, thereby making the stated ratio unattainable over time,” he said.
Further, he said, the LEAP programme thrived on constant movement across the country for monitoring, enrolment, communication, training and targeting.
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