An in-depth investigation by The Fourth Estate has uncovered significant irregularities in the payroll of the National Service Authority (NSA), including the presence of a 72-year-old Kenyan, Kwame Donkor, as a listed beneficiary.
The investigation revealed that Donkor was registered without an official ID card—an unusual anomaly—using only a photograph. However, a reverse image search later revealed that the photo belonged to Emmanuel Mutio, a human resource manager at a private IT company in Kenya.
Further scrutiny uncovered even more alarming discrepancies, including a single name appearing up to 226 times on the NSA payroll.
The Fourth Estate first exposed the ghost names scandal in November 2024 but was initially barred from publishing its findings due to an ex-parte injunction secured by the NSA. The court later lifted the injunction, allowing the report’s release. The investigation examined payroll records from 2017 to 2023 and data from the 2024 national service year.
Speaking in an interview, Kwaku Krobea Asante, Manager of the Independent Journalism Project under the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), described the revelations as deeply troubling.
He highlighted suspicious payroll entries, including 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.
