According to the Executive Secretary of the NIA, Prof. Kenneth Agyemang Attafuah, 16,969,034 persons have registered for the Ghana Card but only 16,535,623 cards have been printed as of today.

He said there were genuine reasons why some of the cards had not been issued.

"There are people who have double-registered. That is potentially a criminal offence," Mr Attafuah said in an interview on Citi FM.

"Those ones are being individually investigated. There are those whose cards have gone into adjudication, not because of double registration but because they have sought to change their vital data in the custody of the authority, such as bio-data. For such people, the system arrests their application, and it joins a queue.

"For such people, until the outstanding issues are rectified, they can’t receive their cards".