Ernest Thompson, former Director-General of SSNIT
A report submitted by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), an audit firm, on Wednesday in Accra to the board and management of the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) on its Operational Business Suite (OBS) project, revealed that the previous management made payments for contract requirements which had not been fully deployed.
The report said even though there were significant challenges with the OBS software within the warranty period, management failed to assert its rights within the warranty provisions to ensure that the issues were resolved by the vendor.
The OBS project formed part of SSNIT’s automation project.
The PwC team, led by Michael Asiedu, which submitted the independent review and baseline assessment, said the OBS project team also signed off on certain key milestones even though the corresponding contractual requirements had not been deployed while payments were made for contract requirements which were already included in the contract.
Again, it said the team, which worked on the OBS project, did not ensure that all the requirements of the project had been met in accordance with the terms and conditions of the contract.
Procurement processes
It said under OBS, change order 7, 70 percent of service level agreements (SLAs) for IBM equipment costing $450,688.29 was paid in advance even before the equipment was delivered to SSNIT.
“Standard practice requires that service level agreement should only become active subsequent to the installation and hand over of equipment.”
“OBS change orders 4 to 6 were implemented before approval was sought from the Central Tender Review Board (CTRB) by the then Director General. For example, request for payment letter dated 24 November, 2015 and goods received note dated 21 November, 2014 indicate that the change order equipment/services had been supplied one year before approval was sought from the CTRB.
“There is no evidence that a contract award letter was issued to PBS on the OBS change request amounting to $9,536,652.00.
“Payment to PBS for OBS change requests included an amount of $686,800 for 808 man days in respect of contingency. It is unusual for payments to include events that have not occurred. We are unable to confirm if the services have been obtained for the contingency payments.”
Recruitment and additional staff
The OBS project team requested for 140 contract staff.
However, 215 staff were recruited, an excess of 75 staff.
The additional 75 staff, who were unsuccessful at the interview for the OBS project, were deployed to various offices of the Trust without being interviewed to determine their capability for the specific roles assigned to them.
The staff cost related to the contract staff from 2013 to 2016 was GH¢27,769,779.76.
Following the expiration of the OBS project, the contract staff were reassigned to various offices of the trust.
There is no indication that a workload analysis was performed to determine the need for additional staff.
Further investigation
PwC has therefore recommended that SSNIT should further investigate the issues identified in the report and subsequently seek legal advice to pursue the vendor to implement the outstanding solutions/modules or refund monies in respect of unfulfilled contractual obligations.
“In addition, where the investigations reveal complicity on the part of any staff, appropriate legal action should be taken against such individuals.”
Pension Administration
The report also noted that SSNIT may consider replacing the pension administration solution together with the relevant matching hardware due to the fact that potentially significant costs may be incurred without the commensurate benefits, adding that any decision with regards to replacement of the Pension Administration solution should however be based on a detailed cost benefit analysis.
“The Oracle projects which are still under warranty should undergo both unit and integrated testing to identify any gaps between contracted requirements and deployed solutions. These should be communicated to the vendor in writing and monitored for resolution before the warranty period expires on 31 January, 2019.”
Project cost
“There were significant contract variations of 84 percent and 60 percent of the initial contract price relating to the integrated financial management suite and OBS respectively.”
Under Messaging and collaboration, it said the OBS contract under Section 1.4.3.3 requested the vendor to integrate SSNIT’s Lync 2010 (messaging and collaboration solution) with the portal.
However, the messaging and collaboration solution has not been integrated with the intranet portal.
For ESB integration and interoperability requirement, included in the OBS contract was an amount of $1,000,000 for an ESB solution.
And this feature was to facilitate the seamless integration of applications and aid the exchange of information between SSNIT’s applications, as well as with external partners.
“Even though this amount has been paid to the vendor, the solution has not been implemented leading to internal applications such as Oracle FMS not seamlessly integrated with OBS. A manual download-upload method is currently being used for the exchange of information between these systems.”
Also under integration with external partners, it said the contract required integration with external partners such as Government of Ghana, Student Loan Trust Fund and National Pensions Regulatory Authority (NPRA).
“This has not been implemented. However, an additional $119,000 was charged as a change request for the integration of Student Loan Trust Fund and paid for on 9 December, 2016.”
Under mobile technologies, the OBS contract requested the vendor to implement a solution to enable management of SSNIT access information such as reports and notification on smartphones for timely decision-making.
This solution was also to synchronise emails, calendar and other functions on mobile devices, but was not implemented.
Under mobile portal, it said a two-way mobile was to be developed as per the contract to enable customers interact with SSNIT.
“The mobile portal from our inspection has not been developed. We visited the external web portal – www.info.ssnit.org.gh and noted that the website was built for desktop resolution and has not been mobile friendly.”
Double payments
Certain features were catalogued in OBS contract, but paid again as a change request.
The contract required functionality for receiving payment via approved electronic payment cards (i.e. eZwich, Visa, Europay, Mastercard) either at the branch or portal.
“Currently, payments via electronic cards cannot be received via the OBS application.
This requirement was subsequently submitted as a change request costing $323,000.
Per the contract, one of the functional requirements for benefits administration and pension payment was for capability to add new ‘benefit types’ by an authorised user.
Currently, users are unable to define new benefit types.
A change request for the definition of ‘emigration’ benefit was submitted by SSNIT and subsequently paid for at a cost of $2,006,000.”
It added that most of the deployed OBS modules do not have reporting functionalities.
By Samuel Boadi