Ghc 1 Billion Fraud Hits Banking Sector After Akufo-Addo’s Bogus Cleanup

National broadsheet, Daily Graphic, is reporting that a Ghc1billion fraud, perpetrated mostly by staff of banks, happened within the Ghanaian banking sector in 2020.

This is two years after the Akufo-Addo government supposedly undertook a banking sector cleanup that cost a whopping Ghc21billion.

According to the Daily Graphic, the most notorious fraud form perpetrated by the bank staff was cash suppression – where a staff takes cash from customers but does not record the full amount in the books and tries to balance it off with deposits made by other customers.

According to the paper, a source from the Bank of Ghana has told it that the banks have on the quiet, lined up perpetrators for prosecution over the financial crimes.

It said a 2020 banking sector report showed that 78.6 per cent of all reported cases of cash suppression had the involvement of staff and out of a total of 2,670 fraud cases reported in 2020, 1,958, representing 73.3 per cent of total submissions, were related to suppression of cash.

“The increasing rate of staff involvement may be attributed to inadequate vetting processes of staff of financial institutions”. There is also the problem of weak internal control systems that allow unauthorised staff to interact with customers, as well as unauthorised staff accessing confidential information and systems that should have been restricted to authorised personnel only, are the major contributory factors that lead to the escalation of this fraud type’, the source said.

According to Graphic, the total value of reported fraud cases in the banking industry witnessed substantial increase last year to hit GH¢1.0 billion, the Bank of Ghana has revealed.

This is compared to GH¢115.51million recorded in 2019.