NSS Scandal: How officials bypassed validation process to stuff payroll with ‘ghost’ names

Officials at the National Service Authority (NSA) circumvented mandatory validation processes for payments of allowances to national service personnel, enabling thousands of nonexistent names to be added to the payroll.

 This made it easy to use the ghost names to drain the public purse of millions of Ghana cedis in allowances intended for national service personnel.

The Fourth Estate has been investigating allegations of corruption at the NSA for some months and has discovered evidence of fraudulent addition of nonexistent names, otherwise referred to as ghost names, to the list of personnel deployed annually since 2018. The inclusion of tens of thousands of fictitious names each year is done through the generation of fake student index numbers that are clandestinely created for various universities and other tertiary institutions. The index numbers that are used for the ghost names are not only fake, but most of them do not follow the patterns used by the universities and colleges whose names were used in assigning the fake index numbers to the ghost service personnel.

The Fourth Estate’s investigations show that the NSA’s system is designed to ensure rigorous verification of work attendance of service personnel  before allowances are paid. This process, known as pre-approval, requires district managers and regional directors to authenticate personnel and confirm their presence at their assigned posts. This is done on monthly basis before payments are made to the personnel.

However, a source familiar with the NSA’s operations disclosed to The Fourth Estate that during the tenure of the immediate-past Director-General, Osei Assibey Antwi, certain high-level accounts operating the authority’s database manipulated the system monthly, allowing ghost personnel to be cleared before regional directors could complete verification procedures.

How the process should work

According to the sources, the NSA is mandated to ensure that only personnel who have actually worked receive allowances each month. The process begins at the workplaces of service personnel (known as user agencies) where their immediate supervisors sign a monthly duty report form confirming attendance. This form is then submitted to the NSA District Office.

“The district manager verifies that the personnel have reported to work and met the required days for payment,” the source explained. “The manager then enters the data into the NSA system, where it is reviewed by the regional internal auditor before reaching the regional director.”

The regional director works on the pre-approval process and forwards the verified list to NSA headquarters in Accra. There, the internal audit team performs additional checks before sending the list to the finance department. Once approved by finance, the list is then forwarded to the Director-General and then to the Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement Systems (GhIPSS) for final payment.

Breach of protocol

Evidence obtained by The Fourth Estate suggests that this procedure was not followed for all pre-approvals at the regional level, despite management being alerted to the irregularities.

During a virtual management meeting in May 2023, the NSA’s Western Regional Director, Okatakyie Amankwaa Afrifa, who has oversight responsibility of the Western North Region, raised concerns about the number of pre-approvals in the two regions under his supervision, hinting at possible padding of personnel numbers.

“My Western Region account always has 250 personnel already approved when I’m doing my pre-approvals, and for Western North, it’s always 993. I don’t know where that number is coming from. I want to supply you with this information to see how you can address it,” Mr. Afrifa, who is also the New Patriotic Party’s Western Regional Secretary, told the meeting, recordings of which are available to The Fourth Estate.

In response, the then Director-General, Osei Assibey Antwi acknowledged the concerns and promised to look into the matter. However, there is no evidence that any action was ever taken to address Mr. Afrifa’s concerns.

When The Fourth Estate contacted Mr. Afrifa, the Western Regional Director of the NSS, he confirmed the irregularities. “I didn’t understand it. That’s why I raised it in our meetings,” he said. He explained that, under normal circumstances, the pre-approval stage in the system should show zero approvals before the regional director’s verification.

He said, he however,  discovered that numbers were already appearing at the pre-approval stage before he completed his checks – meaning some payments had been approved without his verification and input.

“I raised it a number of times and didn’t get a response, so I just kept quiet. I thought it was because it was technical, and people didn’t understand,” he added.

When asked if the issue still persisted, Mr. Afrifa could not provide any confirmation due to inconsistencies in monthly allowance payments.

“What about 2024?” The Fourth Estate asked.

“That was last year, I think there were still some [pre-approved] numbers.”

“And 2023?”

“That was when I raised the issue.”

When The Fourth Estate requested an interview with the directors of the NSA on November 27, 2024, Mr. Assibey Antwi, said he would not be available until December 10, 2024.

Later, The Fourth Estate received a letter from the NSA stating that the institution was unable to grant interviews to The Fourth Estate because it was cooperating with the Office of the Special Prosecutor, which had opened investigations into the scandal following a petition from The Fourth Estate.

The findings from The Fourth Estate investigations raised serious questions about the integrity of the NSA’s payroll system and the potential loss of public funds through ghost names.

At the beginning of every service year, the authority announces to the public, the total number of personnel to be deployed. But behind the scenes, thousands of additional names are added through the creation of fake index numbers of universities and fake PINs for supposed service peronnel who could not take up national service in previous years.

A comparison of figures put out by the NSA to the public for each service year and what was presented to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Education since 2019 reveals a systematic pattern of significantly inflated figures.

These dubious activities are happening at a time when the NSA struggles to pay thousands of genuine service personnel posted across the country  on national service.

“It is disgusting that while many of us struggled to barely feed after being sent to marginalized communities in the middle of nowhere, people were riding on our presence to enrich themselves,” a former national service person, who wants to be known as Joel told The Fourth Estate. “I’m really disappointed. The most annoying part is they didn’t pay me two months of my allowance.”