Vice president Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia has observed that the digitalization agenda by the Akufo-Addo government is resulting in major savings of the public purse.
Citing the recent infusion of digital technology in the operations of the National Service Scheme (NSS) that has saved the country at least GHS112 million in blocked payments to undeserving persons, Vice-President Dr. Bawumia said this was as a result of government’s digitalisation agenda.
“Just a few days ago, I visited the NSS and it was very interesting when I got the briefing that after the NSS basically decided to link their payroll to the Ghana Card, it has resulted to eliminating 14,027 ghost people”. He said with laughter
Adding that “all this is happening at NSS, we haven’t gone to the rest of the public sector. In a year we would have been losing GH¢112 million to these ghost people”.
Dr. Bawumia hinted that government is in talks with the Controller and Accountant General’s Department to carry-out similar exercise in all public sectors.
“Because if this can just exist at one institution, can you imagine what is happening elsewhere that we may not know”, he asked
The vice president was however worried about the reluctance on the part of institutions to release data for government to carry-out this exercise.
“We’ve been struggling for the past 6 months, the people who are holding the data are proving a little difficult in releasing the data for the exercise to take place. They will release it soon; we need to do this public service”. – He said
