Mr. Kobla Mensah Woyome
The Minority in Parliament has brushed aside allegations that there were ghost names on the payroll of the Youth Employment Agency (YEA) which has purportedly caused the state some GH¢50 million.
According to the NDC MPs, the claim by the current management of the agency that people were siphoning money from the YEA for no work done was one of the ways it wants to demonise the outgone management as part of a grand political agenda by the NPP.
The acting Chief Executive of the Agency, Justin Kodua Frimpong, at a media engagement a week ago said an internal audit report had it that the amount was an aggregation of unearned allowances paid to unposted beneficiaries.
But at a press conference addressed by Kobla Mensah Woyome, the Ranking Member of the Youth, Sports and Culture Committee in Parliament, the Minority challenged the management of YEA to produce details of the said ghost names.
“We are challenging management to produce the names, e-zwich numbers, YEA numbers, modules, districts and regions for the said ghosts for the public to check whether they cannot be traced to beneficiaries that had gone through the four phase beneficiary engagement business process,” Mr Woyome said.
He further challenged the new management of the YEA to publish the said audit report it kept referring to, together with the written response of staff that were cited or implicated in the report.
Mr Woyome, the South Tongu lawmaker, explained that following the promulgation of the Act that established the YEA, it had become part of the Public Service Agency (PSA) and goes through the standards of the PSA in recruiting its staff.
He said the Act has insulated the agency from any political organisation and that the YEA has the biometric database of all beneficiaries, including finger prints, adding that any beneficiary of the agency is paid through the Ghana Interbank Payments Systems (GhIPPS) system.
The systems used in the payment of beneficiaries, Mr Woyome said “makes it impossible to pay beneficiaries who do not have appointment letters.
“Before a beneficiary is paid, his or her YEA number is combined with his or her E-zwich number to form a unique ID for the E-zwich system. Without these two attributes, no payment can be made to any beneficiary,” he said.
By Julius Yao Petetsi
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