He said the application, first of its kind in the operations of the Scheme, was specially made to validate the identity of National Service Personnel, using a facial recognition mechanism and the Ghana card.

He said it was meant to speed up the registration process and to also help to detect impersonation and identity theft by fraudsters.

National Identity

This became necessary after increased cases of National Identity theft was being recorded on the system in 2020. There was the need to perform a 3-way match between the identities provided, university information, and the actual user personnel being enrolled.

The application, therefore, performs a facial recognition match between picture on National I.D., picture uploaded during registration, and picture taken physically during regional registration.

Mr Entsiwah Jnr, who is also currently acting as the Director of Corporate Affairs of the Scheme, was speaking to the Daily Graphic to throw more light on the activities of the scheme, with specific reference to the processes leading to the ongoing registration exercise for the newly posted national service personnel for the 2022/2023 service year.

According to him, the use of the Metric Application was first tested during the 2021/2022 posting and registration adding that prior to the release of the postings, Regional Directors and other staff of the Scheme were taken through extensive training sessions on the use of the application for the registration.

“Public awareness was also created for the introduction of the Metric Application. This proved to be effective; so this year, we have intensified its use and we have made progress”, he added.

He noted that the new process allowed specific authorised persons from tertiary institutions to have access to the Scheme’s new Information Management System which warranted direct upload of data of final year lists from the tertiary institutions into the Scheme’s data base for processing and deployment.

This way, only final year students from the tertiary institutions whose details have been duly uploaded could be identified by the Metric Application during registration for authentication and approval. Management has, therefore, held a couple of stakeholder engagements with administrators of the tertiary institutions and other partners of the Scheme on the new registration and authentication processes.

Effectiveness

Highlighting the effectiveness of the Metric Application, the Volta Regional Director said the Metric Application identified some 14,406 national service personnel who were blocked by the system. The resultant effect was the saving of country some GH¢112million, which but for the use of the Metric Application, would have been paid into wrong pockets. The Scheme has thus protected the public purse by holding on to the numbers.

Almost a year after the blockade, some critics would want to be clear about the state of the “on hold” numbers. “Checks from our data show that 13,179 out of the figure have been put on hold for failed authentication, while 219 service personnel are still on hold for Bio-Metric issues.

‘‘Service personnel, who have successfully been cleared and posted, are 147, while 476 service personnel have also had their registration verified and are awaiting posting. In all, 382 of the number have been accepted by user agencies and approved by the regions, while only three service personnel have so far been rejected by user agencies”, he disclosed.