A damning revelation by the Auditor-General has laid bare the vulnerabilities within Ghana’s public pension infrastructure, revealing that the state continued to deposit millions of Cedis into the bank accounts of deceased individuals for years.

The latest audit has unmasked the unlawful disbursement of a staggering GH¢7,494,975.34 to four late pensioners, triggering fresh anxieties over chronic systemic loopholes and institutional sluggishness within the Controller and Accountant-General’s Department (CAGD).

The irregularities are meticulously detailed in the newly released Report of the Auditor-General on the Public Accounts of Ghana – Ministries, Departments and Other Agencies (MDAs) for the year ended December 31, 2025.

According to the audit data, the unearned financial distributions spanned a prolonged timeline, stretching from February 2019 right through to March 2026.

This unchecked expenditure openly flouted Regulation 88 of the Public Financial Management Regulations, 2019 (L.I. 2378), which mandates rigorous verification processes to halt payments to deceased state beneficiaries immediately.

The fact that these payments went undetected across multiple fiscal cycles underscores an alarming lapse in real-time inter-agency data sharing between national death registries, commercial banks, and pension administrators.

Refusing to let the state bear the loss, the Auditor-General has issued a stern directive to the Controller and Accountant-General to track down and claw back every pesewa of the disbursed funds.

The directive explicitly demands that the exact sum of GH¢7,494,975.34 be retrieved, alongside interest calculated at the prevailing Bank of Ghana lending rate, directly from the next-of-kin who may have accessed or benefited from the deceased relatives' accounts.

Furthermore, the report specified clear institutional routing for the clawed-back state cash, ordering that "any recovered funds should be paid into the Auditor-General’s Recoveries Account at the Bank of Ghana."

To ensure the recovery mandate is treated with utmost urgency, the state auditing body has threatened swift punitive measures should the recovery efforts hit a bottleneck.

The report issued a categorical warning, stating that if the money cannot be recovered, legal action should be initiated against both the bankers involved and the next-of-kin of the deceased pensioners.

This directive effectively places commercial banks on notice for their failure to flag and freeze dormant or suspicious accounts belonging to deceased clients.

This multi-million Cedi pension leak forms part of a broader, more worrying pattern of payroll discrepancies flagged during the 2025 comprehensive audit of MDAs, as the Auditor-General intensifies the nationwide crackdown to enforce financial discipline, block fiscal leakages, and protect the public purse.