WORKERS ON government payroll, among them are nurses, teachers, agricultural extension workers and journalists, whose April 2017 salaries did not reflect in their accounts due to anomalies with their social security numbers, have inundated the Brong-Ahafo regional office of the Social Security and National Insurance Trust ( SSNIT) to have the anomalies corrected.
The workers, who expressed misgivings about the unpaid April salaries, said they had been mistaken for ghosts by the Controller and Accountant General’s Department as their names had been punched out of the government payroll.
According to some of them who spoke to Daily Guide, although they have SSNIT numbers and have been contributing to the fund, they don’t understand why the problem this time round. A driver with the Ghana News Agency, Adams Mohammed, lamented to DAILY GUIDE, “I am living but they say I am dead, can you imagine?”
Officials at the regional SSNIT office would not explain to the paper what actually the problem was, claiming that they had not been authorized to talk to the media. They however, asked this reporter to call the corporate director of SSNIT, Eva Amegashie, for explanation. When she was reached, she told the paper that she was in a meeting and so couldn’t have any discussions with the reporter. Her deputy, Victoria Abaidoo, offered some explanation on the phone.
Explaining, Madam Victoria Abaidoo said SSNIT had no problem with workers’ unpaid salaries but the fund was only making sure that their SSNIT contributions were paid by their employers. She said if an employee has SSNIT number but fails to provide the correct numbers to the employer to pay for their SSNIT contributions, the trust cannot be held responsible; “but if you fail to do that or give wrong numbers to your employer, then SSNIT cannot be blamed because it will not tally with our figures hence, we see you to be ghost.”
Ms Victoria Abaidoo said most employees also quote their SSNIT numbers wrongly to their employers, which means when SSINT keys in the figures, they do not correspond with what they have. “Now that the Controller and Accountant General’s Department is using SSNIT numbers to validate workers before they are paid, they have been found to be ghosts” she remarked.
She said the trust started the biometric registration two years ago and all workers ought to have 13 digits biometric figures. Any number less than 13 or more than that is wrong. She said those who have 12 digits on their pay slips must know it is wrong and so they must change it to 13 digits. According to Ms Abaidoo, some workers have 13 digits all right – both on their pay slip and with the controller – but in writing them, they make mistakes with the figures and so cannot be validated. Old workers who have 8 digits too are being told to change to 13 biometric figures.
She disclosed that some workers registered for the biometric all right but failed to come for their cards and so could not be validated.
In the Sunyani office alone, about 400 biometric cards registered between 2014 and 2015 are still lying with the trust. “Now that their salaries are not coming, they are rushing to claim them,” according to an insider who spoke to Daily Guide on condition of anonymity.
Source: Daily Guide
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What do u expect when things are hurriedly done without recourse to details. After all, the president himself is in a hurry to commit blunders. so ssnit is in a hurry to court the eye of the substandard president and his mediocrities so far.
Kudos,DAN for hitting the nail right on the head.No employee wrote his/her SSNIT number wrongly, in G E S ,we were asked to photocopy our SSNIT biometric numbers on our payslips for onward submission to G E S headquarters for inputting and yet some employees realized the SSNIT numbers on their payslips were different from the photocopy SSnit cards/numbers they presented, today these teachers/nurses are said to be ghost because of someones inefficiency in Accra.People in privileged position will secure appointments for their daughters to go and sit in sensitive positions in Accra and key in wrong figures for a poor teacher in a rural area to go hungry because his/her SSNIT number was quoted wrongly by some small girls sitting in G E S headquarters,a teacher travels all the way from bunkpurugu/yunyoo in northern to Accra because of a salary problem and a small girl sitting in an air conditioned office in Accra will tell you to go and come next week as if bunkpurugu/yonyoo is at cantonments or osu, those who have never travelled outside Accra thing Ghana is Accra, they don,t know it takes some people 13/14 hours to get to Accra from their destinations,Ghana paaaa.All the over 26000 workers whose salaries were blocked in April,2017 because of SSNIT biometric are not ghost ,they are all in the field working,somebody is definitely not up to the task, thus causing these 26000 innocent workers much pain.Well that is Ghana for you.
Please it must be made clear that no employee has access to the payroll to input his/her SSNIT number, the problem is with the personnel processing sections of the various M D A,s in Accra who have been given access to the controller payroll machine to key in data of their employees.They end up inputting the SSNIT numbers wrongly.The biometric SSNIT numbers start with an alphabet followed by figures,eg,B0281110I0025 OR K068102150018.However the data entry clerks at G E S, Ministry of health,Local Govt Service and Office of Head of Civil Service end up keying in the figure zero(0) as the letter (O).This changes the SSNIT number completely,it must be made clear that it is only the first that is an alphebet, the rest are figures.In this are when I C T is running the world, i see no reason why the controller and accountant general cannot give access to its regional directorates access to the payroll to input and correct these simple things ,why should everything go to Accra,insertion/correction of SSNIT number,Accra, change of bank/correction of wrong account number,Accra,posting/transfer inputs,Accra,correction of wrongly spelt name on payslip,Accra,wrong management unit on payslip,Accra,deletion of names of deceased employees,Accra,i can continue on and on,i hope someone in a key position in government will read this,knowledge is not the preserve of people in Accra,i rest my case.