$74m SSNIT OBS fraud: ICT dealer should refund cash - PWC advises

The Social Security and National Insurance Trust has been advised by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, an audit firm, to seek legal advice and pursue Perfect Business System, the company that won the contract to furnish SSNIT with an OBS, to either implement the outstanding modules with regards to the system or refund monies for failing to honour its contractual obligations.

The auditing firm has also indicated that the former management of the Trust did not appear to demand accountability when the issue of poor overspending and poor project management were brought to their attention.

The Economic and Organised Crimes Office has preferred charges of willfully causing financial loss to the state against former Director General of SSNIT, Ernest Thompson, and three others. Indications are that they will soon be hauled before court to answer the charges.

The three others are Juliet Hasana Krama, CEO of Perfect Business System, John Hagan Mensah, former OBS Project Manager at SSNIT, and Caleb Afaglo who was General Manager of Management Information Systems at SSNIT.

Former Management of SSNIT, led by Ernest Thompson, settled for the $72 million OBS software to automate all the core processes in the administration of pension although it received tenders to undertake the project at much cheaper prices including $9 million.

The purpose of the OBS was to, among other things, address the lack of effective monitoring and verification of information submitted by both internal and external customers of the Trust.

The project to automate SSNIT operations was initially planned to cost $38m but jumped by close to 400% to hit $147million over the course of four years from 2012 to 2016.

Upon assumption of office, the new SSNIT management, led by Kwame Addo Kufour, who is the board chairman, tasked PricewaterHouseCoopers to access the financial status of the Trust as well as its existing systems.

The report presented to SSNIT at a media briefing on Wednesday by Michael Asiedu-Antwi, a partner at PWC faulted the former SSNIT management for not disclosing the full extent of the issues relating to the Automation Project to the board.

“For Example, the UAT Report dated 31 May 2015 indicated significant challenges with the OBS project, however there is no indication that the nature of these issues were fully disclosed to the board,” the report cited.



It continued that on November 24, 2016, management presented to the board that the ICT initiatives were on-going even though there were significant functional challenges with the OBS.

PricewaterHouseCoopers further specified that there were significant contract variations of 84% and 60% of the initial contract price relating to the Integrated Financial Management Suite and OBS respectively.

With regards to the procurement process, the report mentioned that “Under OBS Change Order 7, 70% of SLA for IBM equipment costing US$450,688.29 was paid in advance even before the equipment was delivered to SSNIT”, something which was against standard practice.



In respect of recruitment of additional staff for the OBS project, the auditing firm established that although the OBS project team requested 140 contract staff, however, 215 staff were recruited, an excess of 75.

“The additional 75 staff who were unsuccessful at the interview for the OBS Project were deployed to various offices of the Trust without being interviewed to determine their capacity for the specific roles assigned to them,” it stated.

It continued that following the expiration of the OBS, the contract staff were reassigned to various offices of the Trust with no work load analysis performed on them to determine the need for additional staff.

The report concluded that payments were approved for change orders which were already included in the contract, adding that although there were significant challenges with the OBS software within the warranty period, “management failed to assert its right within the warranty provisions to ensure that the issues were resolves by the vendor.”

To this end, it recommended that, apart from pursuing the vendor to refund monies in respect of unfulfilled contractual obligations, “where the investigations reveal complicity on the part of any staff, appropriate action should be taken against such individuals.”