Govt saves GH¢140m in one year as service personnel are paid through E-zwich
The National Service Scheme (NSS) has saved about GH¢140million, a year after signing on to the E-zwich platform introduced by the Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement Systems Limited (GhIPSS).
The savings was made from about 35,000 duplicated and non-existent personnel names on the scheme, which was eliminated as a result of the introduction of the E-zwich.
The Acting Executive Director of the NSS, Dr Michael Kpessa-Whyte, who disclosed this at a user group forum by global technology company, EDAPT and the GhIPSS in Accra, said the benefits of using the E-zwich as the mode of payment for service allowance had been enormous.
“We have on the average saved about GH¢12.2 million a month and within one year, we have saved over GH¢140 million. On the average, the scheme was paying about 75,000 service personnel a month, currently we are paying on the average, 40,000 personnel a month, and we couldn’t have done this without the GhIPSS platform,” he said.
He said through the biometric feature the scheme was able to identify people who had become perpetual service personnel, who had subsequently been blocked.
“We even saw some individuals in the system like 15 times, same user name but with different pictures, but of course the finger prints cannot be different in the system. We have blocked all of them and what we intend to do is to write their names and submit to the security agencies because as far as we are concerned they are cheating the state,” he said.
Why E-zwich
The National Service Scheme started using the E-zwich platform as the mode of payment for service personnel in February 2015.
The motive was to ensure that allowances of personnel were paid directly to them without passing through the bureaucratic process and to eliminate ghost names from the scheme’s payroll.
Dr Kpessa-Whyte said through E-zwich, the scheme had been able to use some of the saved funds for development projects and advised other state agencies to consider using E-zwich as their mode of payment.
“If we could save this by going biometric, what are the other agencies waiting for; we need to push very hard, not only for payment of public servants but towards a cashless society,” he said.
Using E-zwich innovatively
The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of GhIPSS, Mr Archie Hesse, said there were over 2.5 million users on the platform.
He said most institutions were using the E-zwich platform innovatively, citing the National Service Scheme and the Students Loan Trust Fund for using it as their main mode of fund disbursement.
Mr Archie Hesse said EDAPT, the company behind E-zwich, had seen the success of the platform and therefore decided to host their first user group meeting in Ghana.