The Chamber said the recent increase in fuel prices will adversely affect commercial operators.

The President of the Ghana Chamber of Commerce, Seth Adjei Baah told Joy FM that high interest rates, coupled with unreliable power supply, put a heavy strain on businesses.

“Even though we are saying Ghana’s economy is growing at a very fast rate, the industry is not growing that much. Last year it grew by 1.7 percent and its industry that creates the volume of employment that we are looking for.”

He said utility bills and interest rates for loans are going up, making it difficult for local industries to compete with those from other countries which produce at cheaper rates and export them into Ghana.
Mr. Baah indicated that “the only way to improve the situation is for government to get involved and create the enabling environment.

“If we want to create the needed employment through industry in Ghana, then there is a need for government to help to reduce the cost of doing business and by so doing, people will be attracted to go into industry.”

He stressed the need to look at other alternatives to revamp the sector, adding that it is not enough to attribute the increment in crude oil and utility bills to global prices, explaining that if the country wants to create opportunities for the youth, then industry must be taken seriously by the government.

“When the ordinary man is employed, that is when we are going to get taxes also to run the economy. Those who are not employed are not paying any taxes so we’ve got to find a way to balance the situation,” he stated.

Source: Myjoyonline/Daily Guide

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The ghost names represent 38 per cent of the pensioners registered so far during the project which is being executed by 3M Cogent of the United States at a cost of $2.385 million.

The project collected biometric data of some 54,544 out of the 88,467 pensioners in the Greater Accra, Eastern, Volta, Central, Ashanti, Western and Brong Ahafo regions.

According to the Project Co-ordinator and ICT Adviser of MoFEP, Mr George Gyamfi, even though some pensioners could not be captured, the number of those pensioners was not substantial.

“A handful of people have called to say that they have not been registered and so we have established a desk at the ministry to register them, but their number will not underestimate the figures we have,” he stated.

Mr Gyamfi told the Daily Graphic in Accra Wednesday that in some of the areas the team visited, the pensioners were dead but their names remained on the payroll, while their allowances were being claimed by unknown persons.

The registration of pensioners, he stated, would end on January 20, 2012.

The first phase of the project, which covers about 96,154 pensioners on the government’s payroll in the 10 regions, was launched by the ministry to capture pensioners who retired on the CAP 30 Pension Scheme.

According to a breakdown of figures from the MoFEP, the Greater Accra Region topped the list with 18,527 ghost names. The region has 34,013 ghost names on the pensioners’ database but the exercise captured 15,486.

In the Eastern Region, 9,976 were registered, instead of the 14,074; the Volta Region had 6,840, instead of 8,620; Central, 5,888, instead of 8,487; Western, 4,447, instead of 7,006; Ashanti, 8,478, instead of 12,195, while the Brong Ahafo Region recorded the least with 643 ghost names.

The Brong Ahafo Region originally had 4,072 names on the database but 3,429 were captured during the exercise.

Public sector payroll expenditure constitutes a significant percentage of the government’s discretionary budget.

However, there is a perception that the public sector payroll is bloated with fraudulent employee records and gross overpayments.
To mitigate payroll management problems, the Rawlings administration introduced the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Database II (IPPD II) in the late 1990s.

Even though some gains were recorded with the system, the government purse and payroll processes and procedures are still burdened with inefficiencies and fraudulent loopholes.

Over the years, and particularly in the recent past, there have been attempts to improve the payroll’s integrity and save cost.

Although the MoFEP and the Controller and Accountant-General’s Department (CAGD) had organised head counts for both active employees and pensioners on the government’s payroll to rid it of ghost names, the problem persists.

One major contributing factor for the failure of past head counts is the lack of adequate mechanisms to effectively identify ghost names on the payroll and delete them.

Where ghost names are identified and expunged from the payroll, some more ghost names find their way back onto the payroll through fraudulent means.

It is in the light of the continued effort to ensure discipline in public finance management that the MoFEP collaborated with the CAGD and initiated the biometric registration and verification of all pensioners and active employees who live on the nation’s coffers.

The scheme is also being replicated to register all the 730,000 public sector workers and is expected to end by June 2012.

According to a source at the CAGD, the government, in 2011, committed GH¢45 million a month as wages for pensioners.

That amounted to GH¢540 million being the amount spent on pensioners’ remuneration last year.

Currently, CAGD figures reveal that the average CAP 30 pensioner receives GH¢468 monthly. This means that with the detection of the close to 34,000 ghost names, the government will save close to GH¢16 million monthly and GH¢192 million annually in wages for pensioners.

In an interview with the Daily Graphic, the Minister of MoFEP, Dr Kwabena Duffuor, stated that the initiative would contribute significantly to minimising payroll fraud and facilitate the cutting down substantially of public expenditure on emoluments.

The government projects to spend close to GH¢6 billion on the wage bill of public sector employees and pensioners in 2012.
But the minister was optimistic that by the time the entire project was completed in June, the nation would have saved close to GH¢1.5 billion.

Source: The Daily Graphic – Ghana

According to the survey by the Korea Employers Federation (KEF), 46.9 percent of respondents said their relationship with labour unions will worsen to some extent in 2012 compared to the previous year, while 9.6 percent answered that labour-management ties at their workplaces will become “significantly unstable.”

The survey was conducted on officials in charge of labour affairs at 302 businesses nationwide.

The surveyed employers are largely concerned that politicians will roll out labour-friendly policies ahead of general elections in April and the presidential election in December, according to the KEF poll. Labour unions’ increasing political influence will be another big concern for the employers, it added.

The findings also said that increased confrontations and strikes by temporary workers and labourers hired by subcontractors of a company will be a threat to labour-management relations this year.

“Poor relations between labour and management may affect the corporate efforts to create jobs amid rising economic uncertainties,” said a KEF official. “The government should push forward with labour plans in a way that helps companies feel less burdened.”