The Minister of Finance, Dr Cassiel Ato Forson, according to a citinewsroom.com report, has disclosed that a nationwide payroll audit has uncovered significant irregularities in Ghana’s public sector salary administration, including over 14,000 unverifiable workers and 53,307 separated staff still on payroll.
Presenting the 2025 Mid-Year Budget Review in Parliament on Thursday, July 24, 2025 Dr Ato Forson said the Ghana Audit Service, commissioned by the Ministry of Finance, has completed 91% of a comprehensive payroll audit across all 16 regions. “So far, the Audit Service has not been able to identify or verify more than 14,000 workers,” the minister told Parliament.
The Minister of Finance further revealed that 53,307 individuals, categorised as retired, reassigned, terminated, on leave without pay or even deceased, are still receiving salaries under the government payroll.
“The Audit Service expects to recover a minimum of GHS150.4 million in unearned salaries from these separated staff over the 2023 and 2024 period alone,” he stated. Dr Ato Forson described the findings as alarming and stressed the need for strict enforcement of payroll validation protocols moving forward.
“Going forward, we will enforce the monthly payroll validation system and strictly apply sanctions to anyone who violates the process of paying salaries,” he added. It is important to stress that the issue about payroll fraud is no more news in Ghana.
Since the advent of the Fourth Republic, almost all the succeeding governments have lamented over the issue, yet none of them has been able to tackle the problem head-on. A whopping GHS150.4 million going to individuals as unearned salaries, within just a year, is a serious matter that would attract the attention of any advanced country, but not here in Ghana, a developing country.
Clearly, if proper investigations are conducted into these reoccurring issues, the culprit would have been found and punished. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen. What we are actually interested in are lamentations and the issues are eventually pushed to the backburner. Obviously, these salaries were paid into accounts owned by human beings. The latter would then issue a cheque to withdraw the cash. If we are serious as a country, can’t we easily crack down on this people and allow the laws of the land to deal with them?
What the Finance Minister, Cassiel Ato Forson, is telling us, as we had earlier indicated, is no more news. Ghanaians expect him to brief them that Messrs A, B, C and D -have been arrested and put before court – for drawing salaries from the government of Ghana coffers, when they are, in truth, not working in any government department.
We suspect this crime is thriving because some officials at the Controller and Accountant General Department have colluded with these criminals to siphon money from state coffers. The fact that every government worker is paid after he or she has been verified through the Ghana Card and yet some of these slippages are being encountered tells a story that it is an ‘insider job’.
Our obsession to steal from the state without using the same brain to create jobs that will employ many Ghanaians is a Gordian Knot The Chronicle is finding it very difficult to untie. But we can’t blame these ‘mater brains’ because the state is not doing much to expose them, let alone being made to face the full rigours of the law.
If we, as a country, do not want to expose ourselves as jokers to the outside world, then this is the time to tackle the problem head-on and stop the lamentations.
