Deputy Auditor General, George Winful, says exercise by the Ghana Audit Service to eliminate ghost names from the public sector payroll is set to begin.
He said the exercise which will begin next week will not entirely wipe the ghost names syndrome even though the motive is to get all ghost names off the payroll.
“Our common enemy is the ghost and so it is important that these workers help us to wipe this menace off because it has become a worry to us as a country,” he said.
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The Ghana Audit Service, the Office of Special Prosecutor and the Ministry of Finance will, from next week, begin a special public sector payroll audit in the country.
It will begin in state-funded offices in the Central Region and subsequently spread to all public sector offices nationwide.
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This World-Bank funded project, though not the first attempt at cleansing the country’s public sector payroll, is the first large-scale and inter-agency approach to sustainably cleaning the payroll.
Speaking on Adom FM’s Morning Show Dwaso Nsem Friday, Mr. Winful urged all heads of departments to cooperate with the audit by providing all documents required for the exercise.
He said about 600,000 workers on the government payroll would be taken through the process, starting from the Central Region, to minimise the recurrence of unearned salaries.
He noted that workers on government payroll will from next week have their salaries stopped if they fail to be enumerated in the upcoming payroll audit by the Auditor General.
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To ensure that the process was completed and offenders dealt with appropriately as required by law, Mr. Winful said the Audit Service is undertaking the exercise in collaboration with the Office of the Special Prosecutor for investigations and prosecutions of persons found to have fraudulently used the payroll to earn income from the state.
