The government’s telecommunications company, GAMTEL, has staff members involved in a D9 million fraud case, according to an audit report from Accord Associate Audit Firm.

The business yesterday gave the National Assembly’s Public Enterprise Committee (PEC) a presentation on its 2021 activity and financial report.

“We discovered during our audit that there was a fraud case involving Customer Care Department employees. It was revealed to us during our examination of the fraud case file that the business had lost D9 million. We now know that the fraud was concentrated on the corporate clients after conducting additional inquiries. Auditors found that these consumers solely made payments with checks or direct transfers—never with cash.

“The employees engaged in the fraud would arrange for these corporate customers to be credited with an amount less than what they have paid, and the difference would then be credited to other alleged customers’ accounts,” the report stated after corporate customers paid for the services rendered by Gamtel.

The suspects would then approach the other purported clients and demand money from them. Thus, Gamtel would not get payment from these additional clients for the rendered services.

It did point out that they were not given a list of these said clients who allegedly gave money to the employees engaged in the scam.

We also saw that the fraud activities had to have been ongoing for a considerable amount of time in order for the total amount involved to reach D9 million.

Additionally, it shows that the internal procedures set up to stop and identify this form of fraud have been ineffective.

Additionally, they noted that the GAMTEL TAWA generated a total revenue of D25,187,603.45 after spending a cumulative total of D60,104,382.47.

“We found that, according to a cost-benefit analysis, the expenses associated with the TAWA exceeded the revenue by D34,916,779.”

“The TAWA project was supposed to be finished in two years, but it took longer than expected and is still unfinished. The project is not a profitable investment, as evidenced by the cost incurred in comparison to the associated revenue. The project’s performance also shows that a sufficient cost-benefit analysis was not carried out before allocating funding to this initiative, according to the auditors.

Hon. Lamin J. Sanneh, the Public Enterprise Committee chairman, stated that the report was adopted subject to certain limitations pertaining to the request made by the committee members after internal consultation.

Thus, the committee assigned them the duty of presenting a report on the hearing related to the nine million dalasi fraud from the disciplinary committee.

The committee then decided to approve the report.