The Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning Wednesday launched a project to clear thousands of ghost names from the government's payroll. The exercise will collect biometric data of some 730,000 public sector employees and pensioners. The project, which is being executed by 3M Cogent of the United States of America (USA), will begin with 100,000 pensioners at the pilot stage throughout the country at the cost of $2,385 million. It is expected to be completed in six months. The launch of the exercise comes on the heels of the 2009 Auditor-General's Report which indicated that Ghana lost some GH¢2.485,697,863, representing 90.3 per cent of financial malfeasance to ghost names on the payroll of the country's foreign missions alone. As one of the leading companies in automated fingerprint identification systems in the world, Cogent operates over 250 operational system installations in 55 countries. A task force set up by the Minister of Education in 2001 to exorcise a targeted 30,000 ghost names from the payroll of the Ghana Education Service (GES) has so far expunged 10,000 names. Based on the 1998 Auditor-General's Report, it is estimated that for every GH¢1O paid in wages, salaries and allowances in 1998, about 60Gp (or six per cent) was an unauthorised payment. As part of measures to sustain the exercise, all newly recruited public sector employees will have their bio-data taken in the immediate future. Launching the project in Accra, the Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, Dr Kwabena Duffuor, observed that the use of fictitious names, duplicates and erroneous entries were system-wide payroll fraud schemes which public sector reform initiatives had failed to curb. "There are reasons to believe that the existence of ghost names and illegal entitlement beneficiaries is on the ascendancy and continues to plaque government databases, resulting in the disbursement of public funds to unauthorised individuals collecting wages, pensions and other benefits which are not due them," he stated. The minister said by using industry-leading technology in biometric identification, the 3M Cogent system would provide a platform for the government to know the true identity of all its employees or entitlement beneficiaries. He indicated that as part of the government's 2011 programme to sustain macroeconomic stability for economic growth, payroll audits in public sector institutions would be intensified to control the rise in public sector wages, among other interventions, in order to strengthen revenue mobilisation. Dr Duffuor pointed out that although the ministry and the Controller and Accountant-General's Department (CAGD) had organised head counts for both active employees and pensioners on the government's payroll to rid it of ghost names, the problem continued to persist. "One major contributing factor to the failure of past head counts has been the lack of adequate mechanisms to effectively identify ghost names on the payroll and delete them. Where ghost names are identified and expunged from the payroll, some more ghost names find their way back onto the payroll through fraudulent means," he added. The initiative, the minister said, would contribute significantly to minimising payroll fraud and facilitate the cutting down substantially of public expenditure on emoluments. The Deputy Controller and Accountant-General, Mr Kwadzo Kufe, said the initiative would not cause any delay in the payment of salaries. He noted that the project would not only weed out unauthorised names from the government's payroll but also ensure that existing payroll data and their additions became credible. The Project Manager of 3M Cogent, Mr Jim Ziska, said the exercise would help the government to uniquely identify individuals and provide accurate and reliable data to help manage strategies towards economic growth. "This will serve as a solid foundation for more appropriate allocation of public funds based' on quality information that will spur economic growth," he added. Source: Daily Graphic