Seven officials of the Public Works Department (PWD) and a staff of the Auditor-General’s Department are being held by the Police CID for forging Payment Vouchers (PVs) to dupe the state of ?59,800,000.

They are Paul Boafo, Greater Accra Region Engineer; Ernest Abrokwah, Senior Quantity Surveyor, Greater Accra; Godfred Yeboah, District Superintendent, Castle Branch and Samuel Ahulu, District Superintendent, State House.

The rest are Kwabena Adjei Johnson, Accountant, Greater Accra, Daniel Asante, Assistant Estate Officer, Amedior-Tengah Alfonse, Internal Auditor, Auditor-General’s Department, Accra.

The revelation followed an audit investigation ordered by the acting Auditor-General, Edward Dua-Agyemang, into the mode of engagement and payment of wages to casual labourers of PWD Prestige.

The source said that during the investigations, it was suspected that PVs for January, February, April, June, August and December 1999, June 2000, February and September 2001 were forged. The investigations revealed that the Accountant, Ahulu, whose schedule it was to prepare and pay all casual labourers, was sidelined by the Regional Engineer, Boafo and that role given to the Assistant Estate Officer, Asante.

With that, Asante prepared manual PVs in respect of the casual labourers after which Boafo wrote to instruct Adjei to raise a single PV to cover the payment. The PV, thus prepared, was then forwarded to the Internal Auditor, Amedior-Tengeh for certification.

The source noted, that even though Asante had no accounting knowledge and was not attached to the accounts section, he was asked to assume full responsibility during those periods.

It was also established during the investigations that Boafo wrote the names of the casual labourers on a piece of paper without any attachments, such as letters of appointment and time cards which would have enabled him to determine the number of days the workers actually worked in a month.

Further investigations, The Ghanaian Times was told, revealed that although Amedior-Tengeh detected the anomalies, he ignored auditing principles by not raising a query about them. Rather, he chose to consult Boafo and thereafter certified the PVs for payment.

The source noted that Amedior-Tengeh, upon instructions from Boafo, wrote a cheque for the amount and went ahead to cash the money from the Bank of Ghana and handed it over to Boafo who verbally delegated Abrokwah and Asante to effect payments.

The paper learned that in October 2000, Seth Kpodovia, an external auditor, during post audit examination, detected some weaknesses in the employment and payments of casual workers. He subsequently submitted his observations to the head of the audit team, Ms Mabel Krow, who had the responsibility to act on the observation.

Sadly, she failed to either inform the Auditor-General or the police of it and rather allowed the perpetrators to continue with the deal. According to the source, the suspected finger prints on the PVs had been sent to the Single Finger Print section for analytical examination and after a report on the findings, the suspects would be arraigned before court.