NSS payroll fraud “cartel” must be dismembered – Prof. Adei

A former Rector of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration, Professor Stephen Adei, has said it will be illusory to assume the corrupt acts that were uncovered at the National Service Secretariat was carried out solely by the people interdicted.

The director of the NSS Alhaji Imoro Alhassah together with some managers were last week asked to step aside by the Governing Board for allegedly paying Ghc7.9 million to non-existent service personnel after a BNI investigation.

“The trouble is that it’s a cartel, especially with the National Service Scheme. People at the headquarters, people at the regional offices and people at the district levels so they’ve synchronised,” he said.

Prof Adei, who spoke to Starr News on the development said he believes the cartel has to be dismembered.

He agreed with calls being made on the Controller and Accountant General’s Department to handover the administration of public sector payroll to a private accounting firm.

“I don’t think the government will be willing to do so although I agree there is a need for an independent body which is best done by the private sector to really clean the system to be relatively corruption proof and ghost names proof. The public services bodies have proven themselves not capable of doing so,” Prof Adei noted.

According to him, the exercise is important because it will help “clean the system and put in measures that makes it such that it’s difficult for the phenomenon to continue.”

He added: “It is doable, it’s not something beyond capacity, especially in this day and age with ICT.”

Prof Adei, however, is of the view that the private firm can only be contracted to carry out its “cleanup duties” temporarily.

“But at the end of the day you cannot ask the government to handover its responsibility of revenue collection and all other responsibilities to private firms. Temporarily it will work, only for the short term,” he added.