The Minority in Parliament is daring the Youth Employment Agency to publish the list of some 16,839 beneficiaries whose names were deleted last week.
The opposition lawmakers said they are convinced the deletion exercise was deliberately done to rid the payroll of persons employed by the past administration.
At a news conference in Accra Thursday, Deputy Minority leader, James Avedzi said there is no evidence to back the Agency’s claim that the affected beneficiaries are ‘ghosts’.
“We are placing on record the Justin Kodua Frimpong management is complicit in the numbers being thrown into the media as ghosts,” he said.
The Acting Chief Executive Officer of YEA, Justin Frimpong announced the deletion of the names of 16,839 out of the Agency’s 63,000 beneficiary list following an internal audit.
He said the audit, conducted within the period of four months, revealed some irregularities at the Agency.
Mr Kodua Frimpong said some of the beneficiaries were using the same E-zwich numbers to access their allowances. He also said there is huge arrears left for the new management as a result of non-payment of beneficiary allowances since May 2016.
He told the media the exercise has saved the country more than GHS20 million which will now be used to create job opportunities for the youth.
But the National Democratic Congress (NDC) MPs said the argument put out by the Agency is false and misleading.
The lawmakers said there are paper and digital trails for the new management to establish the identity of the beneficiaries before going ahead with the exercise.
“At YEA there is a complete digital trail of all money from Bank of Ghana to the bank account of all the youth engaged in the youth module which could be accessed,” Mr Klutse said.
He said the Agency runs a “totally decentralized system” in collaboration with the various security agencies in all districts in the country.
“The YEA district directors in conjunction with their colleague district directors of education, health, fire service, Prisons, police interviewed each of the beneficiaries and there is a paper trail as well so if anybody wants to identify any beneficiary they can easily be traced,” he said.
Mr Klutse Avedzi charged the YEA new management to publish the audit report which came out of its internal audit for Ghanaians to know the content.
Where is the list of the deleted names
We wanna see the names of deleted beneficiaries