How four deceased pensioners milked Ghana of GH¢7.4m across seven years
A damning revelation by the Auditor-General has laid bare the vulnerabilities within Ghana’s public pension infrastructure, revealing that the state continued to deposit millions of Cedis into the bank accounts of deceased individuals for years.
A damning revelation by the Auditor-General has laid bare the vulnerabilities within Ghana’s public pension infrastructure, revealing that the state continued to deposit millions of Cedis into the bank accounts of deceased individuals for years.
The latest audit has unmasked the unlawful disbursement of a staggering GH¢7,494,975.34 to four late pensioners, triggering fresh anxieties over chronic systemic loopholes and institutional sluggishness within the Controller and Accountant-General’s Department (CAGD).
The irregularities are meticulously detailed in the newly released Report of the Auditor-General on the Public Accounts of Ghana – Ministries, Departments and Other Agencies (MDAs) for the year ended December 31, 2025.
According to the audit data, the unearned financial distributions spanned a prolonged timeline, stretching from February 2019 right through to March 2026.
This unchecked expenditure openly flouted Regulation 88 of the Public Financial Management Regulations, 2019 (L.I. 2378), which mandates rigorous verification processes to halt payments to deceased state beneficiaries immediately.
The fact that these payments went undetected across multiple fiscal cycles underscores an alarming lapse in real-time inter-agency data sharing between national death registries, commercial banks, and pension administrators.
Refusing to let the state bear the loss, the Auditor-General has issued a stern directive to the Controller and Accountant-General to track down and claw back every pesewa of the disbursed funds.
