SSNIT To Restructure Pension Funds

The Social Security National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) has said it is expeditiously exploring more viable forms of investments to sustain funds of pensioners.

SSNIT is the statutory public trust charged under the National Pensions Act, 2008 Act 766 with the administration of Ghana's Basic National Social Security Scheme.

Its mandate is to cater for the First Tier of the Three-Tier Pension Scheme.

But the quality of investments by SSNIT has been questioned due to what many have described as the improper handling of employees' contributions over the years.

Speaking on the Citi Breakfast Show on Wednesday, Dr. John Ofori-Tenkorang, Chief Executive Officer of SSNIT admitted that the unstable nature of investments his outfit undertakes is one of the numerous challenges that has affected the operations of SSNIT.

“We have an investment portfolio that needs quite a bit of restructuring. The fundamentals of funds for SSNIT has changed. We collect less than what we pay out. There are examples where some of our investments have not really yielded and we have started rethinking of how we invest.”

He said some infrastructural investments by SSNIT are not accruing the expected revenue because of the dilapidated nature of the structures, adding that, plans are underway to focus more on the services of private investors to revamp the structures to generate more proceeds.

“As for the long-term investments we have a whole lot of real estate development which are in prime areas; we need to restructure our real estate portfolio. We inherited a lot of work in progress in real estate, a lot of them which were quite problematic. We are doing a value of money audit on all the work in progress we inherited with the view of cutting costs and making them more profitable. There are a whole lot of things we want to do. We have hotels which are not performing. We are looking at bringing private sector participation and make money. We want to be a passive investor and yield dividend.”

He bemoaned the situation and promised stringent measures to ensure the sustainability of the pension scheme and reduce the amount of money the company loses.

“So we are taking a fresh look at our investments because mistakes at this time in SSNIT are existent and can be very costly. The cost translate into affecting the sustainability of the scheme. And that is something we are not losing focus on.”

$140m blown on SSNIT's 'partially functional' digitization project – Report

SSNIT spent over $140 million [U$147,970,114.54] on its digitization project, dubbed “Operational Business Suite (OBS)”, and not $72 million as had been reported in the initial stages of what has become known as the SSNIT software scandal.

This was revealed in a report by Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC), and sighted by citinewsroom.com.

Despite injecting such amount, the report by PwC stated that the project in its current state had some core modules not fully functional.

Four persons, including the former Director-General of the SSNIT, Ernest Thompson, according to the SSNIT Board, have been charged for allegedly causing financial loss to the state following the Economic and Organised Crimes Office's (EOCO) investigations into the OBS scandal.

SSNIT under Mr. Thompson allegedly embarked on a digitization drive which has been described as unreasonably expensive.

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By: Nii Larte Lartey/citinewsroom.com/Ghana
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