A painstaking investigation by The Fourth Estate has uncovered the inclusion of a Kenyan named Kwame Donkor, said to be 72 years old, on the payroll of the National Service Authority (NSA).
The investigation, which exposed shocking irregularities in the NSA payroll, established that Kwame Donkor was registered without any ID card, which is an anomaly.
Instead of an ID card, a photo was used.
However, when The Fourth Estate dug further and conducted a reverse image search, it was revealed that the photo actually belonged to Emmanuel Mutio, a Human Resource Manager at a private IT company in Kenya.
It has also emerged that a single name appeared up to 226 times as a beneficiary on the NSA payroll.
The Fourth Estate first uncovered the ghost names scandal in November 2024 but was initially prevented from publishing its findings due to an ex-parte injunction secured by the NSA.
However, the court later lifted the injunction, allowing the report to be published. The investigation covered records from 2017 to 2023, including the 2024 national service year.
During an interview on Channel One TV, Kwaku Krobea Asante, the Manager of the Independent Journalism Project under the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), described the irregularities as frightening. He pointed out that the payroll system contained odd entries, such as individuals over 80 or 90 years old and fraudulent index numbers.
“Ghost names in the sense that what the NSA tells us as the number of personnel is different from what they have in their data. This data, we believe, eventually makes its way into the payroll and gets paid. Now, the government has confirmed this.”
“Beyond that, we see how they do this—how they pack the payroll with ghost names, which is what the story is trying to expose. How they use over-age individuals, some as old as 80 or 90 years, to falsify records. How they create fake index numbers in the name of universities to justify these names.”
“Funny names keep appearing—a single name could be repeated 226 times. Such a person supposedly completed the same university, studied the same program, in the same year, and was deployed multiple times. A lot of oddities in the data suggest that these entries were deliberately manipulated.”
The suspected ghost names on the NSA payroll are now the subject of a probe ordered by President Mahama.
A headcount of active national service members exposed the probable phantom names, according to Felix Kwakye Ofosu, the president’s spokesperson and Minister of Government Communications.
As part of efforts to pay off unpaid allowance arrears dating back to August 2024, Mr. Ofosu clarified that the exercise was carried out at the request of Dr. Cassiel Ato Forson, Minister of Finance.
Once the headcount was completed, the Finance Ministry issued GHS 226,019,224 to settle arrears for 98,145 legitimate service personnel.
“This figure is 81,885 less than the 180,030 names presented by the previous management of the Authority for allowance payment in 2024,” the minister’s statement said.
