[ 2017-05-15 ]

Finance Minister, Ken Ofori Atta

Sorry for deleting genuine names from payroll – Ofori-Atta
The Ministry of Finance has rendered an apology to
civil servants whose names were deleted from
government payroll following measures by
government to sanitise the system by deleting
ghost names.

The Ministry ordered the removal of 26,589 names
of public workers from government payroll. Those
affected had not been registered on the new SSNIT
biometric system, despite several directives to do
so.

The move, according to the ministry, was to
protect the public purse by plugging all leakages
in the system. However, some genuine public sector
workers were mistakenly deleted from the payroll,
angering some labour unions.

Presenting a speech at the ongoing National Policy
Summit in Accra on Monday, 15 May, sector minister
Ken Ofori-Atta apologised and called on labour
groups to exercise restraint as the ministry
expeditiously resolves the challenge.

“With wage issues we have to stay within
appropriation and control of wages. We did an
exercise recently in which quite a number of
people were taking out of the payroll. We’ve had
some remarks from some unions, but the real
question for all of us in the country is that we
know that there is some rot in there, we know we
need to take some action and in the process of
taking the action a few wrong eggs will be broken
and we should apologise for that,” he stated.

He continued: “But in terms of principally
understanding and appreciating and working towards
a solution, I think that should be the spirit of
which our labour partners talk to us. I don’t
know the labour partners who we may have wronged,
but going through the numbers I actually found one
or two of the directors of finance being included
in the list that they don’t exist.

So there are mistakes, which is OK, but truly we
are talking about six, seven hundred or even a
billion cedis of potential savings. I think it’s
incumbent on all of us to work in that spirit
because we at the Ministry have no personal
interest in individual names but in making it
efficient because if we also pursue the
investigation I think it will be very embarrassing
to realise that your young friend Kojo or Kwame in
Elubo is actually able to continue to pay three
other people and put that money in his pocket.

“I’m not sure the labour unions are trying to
support that type of action, so we do apologise
for those who should not have been in but I think
we should all resolve that we are going to clean
up so that individuals do not privatise this
business.”

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