A five-year analysis of the Auditor-General’s reports on selected public institutions by The Fourth Estate has revealed that GHS 88.33 million was paid in salaries to non-existent employees and individuals who were not entitled to them.

The defaulting institutions included Ministries, Departments, Agencies (MDAs), and Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) across the country. The money was paid to persons who had either resigned, retired, died, or never existed on the payroll.

The analysis spanned from 2021 to 2025.

Within the period, the audit reports revealed as culprits, the Ministries of Health,  Finance, Education, the Interior, Transport, Local Government and Trade and Industry. Others are the ministries of Justice, Gender, Children and Social Protection, Food and Agriculture, as well as Lands and Natural Resources.

Other agencies included the Atomic Energy Commission, Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, Ho Teaching Hospital, Tamale Teaching Hospital, Electoral Commission, Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Institute, Social Welfare, School Feeding Programme, Ghana Police Service, Ghana Education Service – in all regions, regional, district and polyclinics, Judicial Service, Ghana National Fire Service, among others.

The total money paid in unearned salaries by the aforementioned institutions amounted to GHS84.97 million.

According to the reports, human resource administrators and payroll validators failed to update records when staff vacated posts, leading to continued payments to accounts of deceased officers.

Again, staff under interdiction received 100% of their salaries instead of the required 50%. Staff absent without leave continued to be paid, while some staff were placed on higher grades than their qualifications/positions warranted.

Similar patterns emerged from the Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies across the country, draining the public purse to the tune of GHS 3.36 million on unearned salaries.

The reasons were the same: weak HR systems, poor coordination with the Controller and Accountant-General’s Department, and a lack of accountability.

In 2024, payments to unmerited employees of Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) alone surged sharply to GHS41 million, up from GHS9.93 million in 2023.

A financial expert, Major Ashirifie, told The Fourth Estate that Ghana has sufficient laws and robust control systems to ensure the public purse is protected, but unfortunately, people manning the institutions deliberately flout the laws and the systems.

“It clearly shows that our monitoring system doesn’t work,” he said, questioning the responsibilities of the internal auditors in protecting the public purse.

The Controller and Accountant-General, Kwasi Agyei.

In an interview with The Fourth Estate, Controller and Accountant-General, Kwasi Agyei, who was appointed in 2024, said he could speak only to the 2024 report on unearned salaries. He declined to comment on the 2025 report because he had not yet appeared before Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee.

He confirmed The Fourth Estate’s analysis that GHS 41 million was blown on unearned salaries by the Ministries, Departments and Agencies in 2024. This figure excluded a further GHS980,319.05 paid by Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies in unearned salaries that same year.

“There was GHS41 million on ancillary in the 2024 Auditor-General’s report to Parliament,” he said, adding that “I wrote to the OSP [Office of the Special Prosecutor] to investigate and then recover that amount to the state.”

Mr Agyei said the law must deal with the validators after the recoveries are made. “So we should recover and punish those who validated them [employees]. That is why we compiled the list of the validators to OSP,” he said.

“Every month, somebody in any institution has to validate the payroll before we pay. So, if you are a validator and you validated people and we,[at] the Controller, pay them, then of course, the validator also has to be held responsible,” the Controller and Accountant-General said. “If the person is out of station, the person has vacated the post, and you keep on validating, we will continue to pay.”