Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta has apologized to all public sector workers whose names were mistakenly removed from government’s payroll. 

This follows the massive uproar that greeted the denial of more than 26,000 public workers their pay, due to their failure to undergo biometric registration.

They were declared ghosts on the payroll and therefore removed. Some unions have threatened to go to court over the matter. 

But speaking today, Monday, May 15, 2017, at the National Policy Forum in Accra, Ken Ofori-Atta regretted the error and promised to fix the problem. 

“Quite a number of people were taken off the payroll [and] we’ve had remarks from some unions. We know that there’s some rot in there, we have to take an action and in the process of taking an action a few wrong eggs would be broken and we should apologise for that,” the Minister told the gathering. 

He revealed that he had found out that some of the affected persons are staff of his own Ministry.

“Going through the numbers I actually found one or two of the Directors at Ministry of Finance have been included in that list they don’t exist. So there are mistakes…”

Nonetheless, he said the exercise is a useful one and must be supported by all Ghanaians.

The Minister revealed the government has saved close to a billion Ghana Cedis following the cleaning of the payroll.

He said the government has shown “a lot of confidence and competence” in the management of the economy resulting in last week's review of Ghana's creditworthiness from B with a negative outlook to B with a stable outlook by the rating agency, Fitch. 

Fitch last Friday, reviewed Ghana’s credit rating outlook from negative to stable explaining that the review was influenced by government’s resolve to stabilize the economy.

“I believe [that] already we are seeing the results,” Ken Ofori-Attah said.