EC’s figures on accreditation fees don’t add up – Ursula Owusu

Minister of Communications, Ursula Owusu has said the Electoral Commission’s (EC) figures representing monies it accrued from accreditation fees issued for the 2016 December elections do not add up.

The Chairperson of the Commission, appeared before Parliament on Wednesday to brief the house on how much the commission made from the controversial fees it charged journalists for accreditation ahead of the 2016 general elections.

Making a case for her submission, Madam Owusu said : “When the Chairperson was making her presentation, she indicated that 4,271 applications were received for media persons and they charged them 10 cedis each for the accreditation in addition to that 273 media persons were accredited without any charge because they were at the national collation centre and they paid the centre a total of 42,713 cedis for all these cards that they processed so if you add 4,271 to 273 you get 4, ,544 .

Now by my calculation she said the printer charged them 8 cedi per card without the fee. Multiplying the 8 by the 4,544 will give you 36, 352. She further indicated that they paid 10 cedi because they added VAT to the 8 cedi charge which will be two additional fees and that will bring the total to 45,440 and yet she told us that they paid a total of 42,113 so it does not add up.”

She added that “Now in her response she[Charlotte Osei] indicated that they were not actual figures..She said they just extracted figures based on the amount in their coffers as against the amount they paid…she said she was not the one who actually paid those monies and these were the figures that she quoted from the records and it just did not add up because going by her own calculation, they either paid too little or too much to the printers and where did the rest of the money go?”

Meanwhile Charlotte Osei has said that that commission has not spent monies it accrued from the replacement of voter IDs for Ghanaians ahead of the 2016 December elections.

According to her, the EC made GH¢2.5 million from the replacement process.
Answering an urgent question filed by the Member of Parliament for Subin, Eugene Antwi on how much the Commission accrued from the process and how it expended it, Charlotte Osei said all monies were currently in the Commission’s account at GCB Bank.

This is despite a regulation that demands that the money was added to the consolidated funds.

Charlotte Osei said it was an “oversight” that the money was not transferred to the consolidated funds.

Source: citifmonline.com