Daniel Yao Domelevo
The Audit Service Board has revealed that the Auditor General, Daniel Yao Domelevo, has passed the age needed to remain in office and said he is supposed to go on retirement.
The controversial Auditor General yesterday returned to post after serving his 167 days mandatory leave on the orders of the presidency last year, but there was uneasy calm at the Audit Service Head Office in Accra after being greeted with the news about his retirement.
Entering Work
Mr. Domelevo reported to work at about 8:20am and used the back door to enter his office because the main lock had been changed.
Ahead of his return, the Auditor General had been having a war of words with the Audit Service Board led by Prof. Edward Dua Agyeman over the revelation that Mr. Domelevo had passed the retirement age of 60 and needed to go on retirement.
According to Prof. Agyeman, initially when they wrote to Mr. Domelevo to come clean on his age, he (Domelevo) rubbished the board but when the board wrote a second letter attaching incontrovertible evidence that he had crossed the retirement age, he started telling “stories.”
Letters Battle
The Audit Service Board said in a letter dated February 26, 2021 that “Records at the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) completed and signed by you indicate your date of birth as June 1, 1960 when you joined the scheme on October 1, 1978. The records show that you stated your tribe as Togolese and a non-Ghanaian. That your hometown is Agbatofe.”
“On October 25, 1992, you completed and signed a SSNIT Change of Beneficiary Nomination form, stating your nationality as a Ghanaian and your hometown as Ada in the Greater Accra Region. The date of birth on your Ghanaian passport number A45800, issued on February 28, 1996 is June 1 1961. That place of birth is stated as Kumasi, Ashanti Region,” the correspondence stated.
Mr. Domelevo has rejected the claims and said “Either my father wrongly mentioned Agbatofe in Togo as his hometown to me, or I misconstrued it at the time…My mother is also Ghanaian.”
On his true date of birth, Mr. Domelevo said he noticed that the 1960 date of birth was a mistake “when I checked my information in the baptismal register of the Catholic Church in Adeemmra.”
Interesting Permutation
Per the records being bandied about, Mr. Domelevo must have been 17 years when he entered official government employment in 1978, that is if he was born in 1961 and 18 years, if he was born in 1960.
Important Flashback
In 2018, Mr. Domelevo was all over the place insisting that he was going to chase out all government workers who falsified their ages to remain in government employment.
He had said at a forum that “Many people are over aged on the payroll. When the curtain falls it is time to leave the stage. Ghanaians don’t know that. They falsify birth certificates so as to remain below 60 years. You meet some people who are still active workers and you wonder how many times they will be 60 years. So we will bring that out. When I talk about it people don’t know how serious it is.”
Prof’s Fire
Prof. Agyeman returned Mr. Domelevo’s fire yesterday insisting that “As far as we know, the documents are authentic, our information is authentic, he should have retired in 2020, and therefore he is deemed to have retired.”
Prof. Agyeman said on Citi FM that Mr. Domelevo could not deny the records and to the extent that there was no legal document to indicate a change in the stated nationality and date of birth, the board held the old documents to be true.
“It is not me, it is his own records showing it, and he filled forms and signed himself so if it is otherwise, he has to find a legal instrument to prove that he has changed it or the first one is wrong…In public service we deal with documents and the documents he signed himself, showed that he is Togolese,” he stated.
“It is for him to accept from his own records that this is the case. I don’t think that he will deny it. He knows. I don’t know whether he is coming or not but that is not my business…Let’s wait till tomorrow comes.”
He said the proper authorities would know what decisions to take on the issues especially those that bothered on illegality.