The management of the National Service Scheme (NSS) has outlined plans to roll out a paperless registration and deployment process, beginning with the 2018/2019 service year.

The paperless system, which was revealed during the 2018 Tertiary Educational Sector Stakeholders’ Conference in Accra, will help address the issue of fraud which has riddled the scheme over the years.

In an interview with GhanaWeb, the Acting Executive Director of the National Service Scheme, Ussif Mustapha said the paperless system would help strengthen the scheme’s database to ensure effective and convenient registration and deployment of service personnel for the 2018/2019 service year and beyond.

“We are organizing this stakeholders’ conference for our tertiary education providers, that is, the universities, technical universities and training institutions for us to strengthen our database in order to have effective and efficient posting for the 2018/2019 service year,” he explained.

He opined that the new system will help eliminate instances whereby NSS applicants have to form long queues to undergo registration.

“It is going to eliminate the issue of gathering most NSS personnel at one particular centre to do registration because this is going to be automated. So, service personnel by the click of a button will be able to authenticate his or her ID. That is why we have hooked our system into the central database system where once you are going to enrol, you are expected to enter your ID number so that you will crosscheck even before you are deployed”.

The issue of fake appointment and posting letters have also been addressed, with the inclusion of QR codes which can be used to verify authentic NSS letters.