Daniel Demelevo
The Auditor General, Daniel Yao Demelevo, has kicked against contract employment because the practice was draining the country of huge sums of financial resources that could be utilised to develop the nation.
He noted with great concern that some public workers, as old as 70 years, who had reached retirement age, had falsified documents just to perpetuate their stay in office and yet expected their unemployed children and relatives to be employed in the public sector.
“I think one of the major problems we have in this country is contract employment. We have to say it and say it as it is, that when the curtain falls, it is time to leave the stage. You must go home and join your grandchildren so that others can also come” he stated
Mr Demelevo, who was speaking at the launch of the National Payroll and Personnel Validation Audit exercise at Elmina on Monday, observed with worry that “the system continued to pay ghosts who are removed from the payroll only to resurrect again”.
The nationwide enumeration exercise which is expected to be completed by the end of November is aimed at cleaning the “bloated’ payroll.
The exercise, which commenced yesterday (July 17) in the Central regional capital, Cape Coast, is being carried out by the Audit Service in collaboration with the Controller and Accountant-General Department.
The Auditor General therefore warned that he was on a “deadly mission” with the Special Prosecutor to prosecute those who would be found culpable at the end of the exercise and would go all out to ensure that the government payroll was cleaned to save the country the needed financial resources.
According to him, of every one cedi collected as revenue, 44.7 pesewas went into the payment of public sector workers, stating that it was the bane of the country’s development and growth.
Mr. Demelevo also argued that it was “irrational” for the country to contract persons who retired on their salaries and put them on the government payroll, while there were so many unemployed graduates as a result of lack of funds.
He added: “The former Auditor General, for example, retires on his salary so anytime my salary goes up, his also enjoys salary increase and so if you engage such a person again as a contract person, there is so much being spent on one person, meanwhile our graduates don’t have jobs to do.
“We cannot have people unemployed who want to be employed and we have people on the payroll who are not employed. Because we are paying ghosts, we cannot engage our graduates”.
He said he would activate his constitutional mandate under Article 187 Clause 7 to disallow the expenditure and on whoever’s payroll he found in the ghost names.
Mr. Domelevo urged heads of institutions and agencies to collaborate with the Service to ensure a clean payroll adding that they had a duty to ensure that people who were paid on their payroll were those who worked for them only according to the Financial Administration Regulation.
He admonished the enumerators to be professional, diligent and discharge their duties without fear or favour.
Central Regional Minister, Kwamena Duncan, noted that though some achievements had been made in cleaning the payroll data, challenges waged on as perpetrators continued to map out new strategies to stay on the payroll.
He said such financial leakages were a threat to national development and implored all to support the efforts of the Audit Service and the Controller and Accountant General Department in their quest to ensure clean payroll.
He commended the Audit Service for the initiative and added that protecting the national purse was a collective responsibility which every Ghanaian must assist accordingly.
Deputy Auditor General and Team Leader of the enumeration exercise, George Winful, said it would be conducted in a way that would not disrupt government business and urged all public workers not to take it for granted.
He said about 600,000 workers out of which 51,000 were from the Central Region were expected to be enumerated under the exercise.
GNA