The Attorney-General and Minister of Justice says GH₵548,333,542.65 has been lost to the state through the criminal enterprise of top-level executives of the National Service Authority (NSA) and their accomplices.
The State lost GH₵ 25,857,836.16 in 2018/2019; GH₵ 21,613,962.24 in 2019/2020; GH₵ 55,670,584.32 in 2020/2021; GH₵ 61,383,025.74 in 2021/2022; GH₵350,926,977.12 in 2022/2023 and GH₵32,881,157.07 in 2023/2024, Service years.
Dr Dominic Akuritinga Ayine said the criminal enterprise resulting in the loss of the colossal sum of money to the State involved the creation of ghost names within the NSA payroll system.
Dr Ayine, updating the media on Operation Recover All Loot (ORAL), said the alleged crime was committed by some directors and staff. “This they did in direct collaboration with vendors and other accomplices.”
He said in or around February 2022, the management of the National Service Authority announced the introduction of a digitalization system which they claimed had saved the country some GH₵112million.
He said through an app known as the Metric App which allegedly combines facial recognition technology and identity card checks for verification and validation, the NSA blocked the enrolment of some 14,027 potential fraudsters on to the scheme for the 2021-2022 service year.
He said despite these claims, the Minister of Finance, Dr Cassiel Ato Forson, ordered a head count of all national service personnel as a precondition for the disbursement of arrears of allowances payable to the personnel dating back to August 2024.
The Attorney-General said it was discovered that around 81,885 were ghost names, and their investigations had revealed a sprawling criminal enterprise which network covered the entire country.
He commended the Fourth Estate for their excellent foundational work.
The Attorney-General said their investigations revealed that, prior to the commencement of each new service year, the directors would submit to Parliament for approval a budget figure representing the number of prospective service personnel for that service year.
Consistently, these figures were inflated by huge numbers and during the fiscal year, the directors would write to the Minister of Finance requesting permission to utilise excess funds allocated in the budget of the NSA.
He said once authorised, the directors would transfer the funds into the NSA’s project account at the Agricultural Development Bank and under the pretext of executing their projects, they would divert the funds into private pockets.
He said another criminal scheme hatched and exploited by the directors and staff was the deployment of ghost names onto the NSA system.
‘Once deployed, the directors will then request that both ghost names and genuine names be transmitted by the Head of Accounts to the Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement Systems (GHIPSS) for payment,” he added.
These payments included payments to E-zwich cards procured for the fictitious national service personnel.
He said their investigations compared monthly data of verified national service personnel generated from the central management system and submitted to the NSA accounts office and the data of NSA personnel who were actually paid through the GHIPSS system for a period of six years (2018-2024).
Dr Ayine said it was established that a total of 587,543 personnel were to be submitted to GHIPSS for payment of allowances.
Meanwhile, data from GHIPSS showed that 650,165 personnel were paid, indicating that 63,672 constituted ghost names.
These consisted of the following categories of personnel including National Service Personnel, who were blocked on the CMS during the registration process; National Service Personnel numbers that exist in the payment records but do not exist on the CMS, NSA volunteers, and NSA management/staff and marketplace vendors.
He said their investigations additionally established that some of the ghost names were added to the lists submitted by the vendors, representing the number of service personnel to whom they had supplied items or provided loan facilities.
Dr Ayine said when these vendors eventually received payments, the directors and staff would then contact the vendors whose accounts had received payments, meet with them, and collect the additional money that had been added to the vendors’ payments.
“For instance, we have conclusively established that, after collecting these funds, some of the suspects, such as Gaisie, Nyarko, and Oteng handed them over to suspect Osei Assibey Antwi in cash and on some occasions deposited the cash into his bank account,” he added.
He said some directors, such as Gifty Oware-Mensah, created and executed a meticulously detailed plan, using NSP allowances as security to obtain a loan of GH¢30,698,218.69 from the Agricultural Development Bank (adb) at an interest rate of 23 per cent.
She achieved these results by using other people’s information to register a company called Blocks of Life Consult without their knowledge or permission.
Subsequently, she presented “BLOCKS OF LIFE CONSULT” through a middleman in the person of Maxwell Akwesi Ofori-Mintah to an official of the Agricultural Development Bank, enlisting her husband, Peter Mensah, a lawyer, to act as one of the directors/ representatives of the said company.
She told adb that the company specialised in supplying home appliances to National Service personnel and proposed that ADB finance the company to enable it to supply these items on hire purchase to the service personnel, with the NSA being responsible for handling the deductions and repayments.
However, in the marketplace of the Authority, there was no indication that “BLOCKS OF LIFECONSULT” was a registered vendor.
He said within two service years (2022-2023 and 2023- 2024), Gifty Oware-Mensah allegedly used a total of 9,934 ghost names to misappropriate the funds.
The Attorney-General said investigation established that, after adb transferred the funds into the account of the company, she subsequently transferred the funds into four different company accounts with the following names: AMEACOM, Scafold, OTCHEY, and Aristo Logistics and Trading.
It was further established that Gifty was the director of AMAECOM and Scaffold Company Limited which belonged to Abraham Gaisie.
That, between March 3, 2023, and May 24, 2024, Gifty transferred GH₵22,925,518.69 to AMAECOM, GH¢1,000,000.00 to Scafold, GH¢1,572,700.00 to OTCHEY, and GH¢5,200,000.00 to Aristo Logistics and Trading.
GNA
