Former National Democratic Congress (NDC) Member of Parliament for Akwatia has condemned the Youth Employment Agency (YEA) for deleting a total of 16,839 ghost names from its payroll.

Mohammed Baba Jamal believes YEA’s decision to delete names suspected to be ghost names amounts to witch-hunting.

“Why must the YEA come out and tell us the number of people they have deleted from the payroll when indeed you could have published names of these victims for us to indeed believe you. You never reported to the police or even the security agencies when you claim it’s a matter of fraud” he said.

Mr Baba Jamal was speaking on Adom FM’s Morning Show “Dwaso Nsem” Thursday concerning the deletion of ghost names on the Agency’s payroll.

According to the agency, the deletion became necessary after they detected some financial malpractice which led to the suspension of the payment of allowances of beneficiaries.

The agency mentioned that the audit detected that some people have ended their service with the agency but they are still being paid by the agency

Some of the affected persons also had no appointment letters while some of the letters did not have signature of CEO.

But Mr Jamal who was also a Deputy Minister for Employment & Labour Relations urged the agency to rather publish names of the said ghost names in public and report the issue to the police for their arrest if indeed there is an issue of fraud.

He said the previous Mahama- government left over GHC 100 million in YEA’s account and therefore could not fathom why the Agency claims there was no money.

“What these people are saying and doing is not a new thing, it was something we (NDC) started. Even during our time, we left over 100 million Ghana cedis in YEA account so where from all these lies. I think they can’t pay the workers and only using tactics to delete names” he noted.

Listen to Baba Jamal