The Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) has revealed that very few people have merged their numbers with the Ghana Card. According to SSNIT, this phenomenon is due to the lagging NIA registration process.
A day to the announced 31st December deadline for the exercise, only 1.1 million active contributors had merged their numbers.
The process saw SSNIT deploy systems to Members of the Scheme to merge their SSNIT and Personal ID numbers on their Ghana Cards with a deadline of December 31.
However, only a fraction of SSNIT cardholders have been able to go through the merging process, with a majority blaming it on the inaccessibility of the Ghana cards.
Acting Public Affairs Manager at SSNIT, Charles Akwei Garshong tells Citi Business news, a number of active SSNIT members still have challenges with acquiring their Ghana cards.
“So far, majority of the people that we have engaged who are yet to do the merger, they have one issue which is that they have not been able to go through the NIA registration process. That’s partly because of the limited registrations that they are doing across the various district offices that they have. So these concerns have been raised and it has gotten to the attention of management”, he said.
As part of the government’s plan to migrate all identification numbers onto the National Identification card, also known as Ghana card, the Social Security and National Insurance Trust on June 28, 2021, began processes to merge all SSNIT numbers to the Ghana card.
The merger is also in compliance with Regulation 7 (1) of the National Identity Register Regulations, 2012, L.I. 2111, and a directive from the National Pensions Regulatory Authority (NPRA).
SSNIT however says it will soon come up with a new deadline for the merging of SSNIT numbers and the Ghana Card.
“In the coming days, management will sit on it and come up with a decision. So once that decision is made, if it is to extend the deadline for members to merge their numbers, that will be announced in the coming days” Mr. Garshong added.
