Reported allegations that the Tamale Teaching Hospital paid salaries to “ghost employees” have been refuted.
The Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) and the Controller and Accountant General’s Department (CAGD) expressed concerns about certain irregularities, including unauthorized and inactive validation that resulted in payments to ghost names, after examination of the payroll system in the Northern Region, which included the Tamale Teaching Hospital and educational institutions under the Ghana Education Service (GES).
Aliu Zuberu, the Tamale Teaching Hospital’s public relations officer, responded to the allegations in an interview with Citi News monitored by Puretvonline.com on Wednesday, saying that while the hospital was not aware of the findings, steps will be taken to guarantee openness.
“We don’t agree with the information that is published. We haven’t received any official word from the OSP, but all we’ve seen is a document circulating online.
Therefore, we are treating the issues stated very seriously even as we wait for any official communication. We don’t yet have all the information about HR, personnel data, and other related matters, as well as some of the concerns they brought up. However, we are hearing phantom names, followed by validation using dormant validation data, and so on.
In order to ensure that they are not ghost names as has been claimed and that we are not verifying any employees who are not truly on our payroll or even at post, we must run their claims through our system.
He said, “So internally, we are evaluating what the OSP is putting out, and we’ll definitely respond to them suitably.”