An investigation by The Fourth Estate has revealed serious irregularities in the National Service Authority (NSA) payroll, including the name of a 72-year-old Kenyan, Kwame Donkor, who was wrongly listed as a beneficiary.

The investigation found that Donkor was added to the payroll without an official ID card, which is unusual. Instead, a photo was used. However, when The Fourth Estate ran a reverse image search, they discovered that the photo actually belonged to Emmanuel Mutio, a Human Resource Manager at a private IT company in Kenya.

Another shocking finding was that the same name appeared on the payroll 226 times as a registered beneficiary.

The Fourth Estate initially uncovered the issue in November 2024, but the NSA obtained a court order preventing them from publishing the findings. After the court later lifted the injunction, the report was finally released. The investigation examined payroll records from 2017 to 2023, as well as the 2024 national service year.

Speaking on Channel One TV, Kwaku Krobea Asante, Manager of the Independent Journalism Project under the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), described the findings as alarming.

He noted that the payroll included names of people over 80 or 90 years old, along with fake index numbers, raising concerns about widespread fraud.

"Ghost names in the sense that what the NSA tells us as the number of personnel is different from what they have in their data. This data, we believe, eventually makes its way into the payroll and gets paid. Now, the government has confirmed this."

"Beyond that, we see how they do this—how they pack the payroll with ghost names, which is what the story is trying to expose. How they use over-age individuals, some as old as 80 or 90 years, to falsify records. How they create fake index numbers in the name of universities to justify these names."

"Funny names keep appearing—a single name could be repeated 226 times. Such a person supposedly completed the same university, studied the same program, in the same year, and was deployed multiple times. A lot of oddities in the data suggest that these entries were deliberately manipulated."

President Mahama has ordered an investigation into suspected fake names on the National Service Authority (NSA) payroll.

According to Felix Kwakye Ofosu, the president’s spokesperson and Minister of Government Communications, a recent headcount of national service personnel revealed possible ghost names.

This verification process was done at the request of Finance Minister Dr. Cassiel Ato Forson as part of efforts to clear outstanding allowances dating back to August 2024.

After completing the headcount, the Finance Ministry released GHS 226,019,224 to pay 98,145 verified national service personnel.

"This figure is 81,885 less than the 180,030 names presented by the previous management of the Authority for allowance payment in 2024," the minister’s statement said.