Officers of EOCO attend workshop on insurance, tax fraud

12/10/2010

Story: Musah Yahaya Jafaru
SEVENTY-TWO officers of the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO), formerly Serious Fraud Office, yesterday began a nine-day training workshop on how to fight insurance and tax fraud in the country.
Courses being treated at the workshop include insurance fraud and claims, principles and elements of insurance, insurance documentation, practical issues of insurance and nature of risk.
The workshop is jointly organised by the Ghana Insurers’ Association (GIA) and EOCO, and the resource persons are from the insurance industry in Ghana, Sierra Leone and the Gambia.
In his address, the Deputy Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Mr Barton Odro, said organised crime had become very sophisticated with players who were very astute, evasive, elitists, knowledgeable and well connected to the corridors of power.
Besides, he said, the use of modern technology by the fraudsters had enabled them to keep changing the means and methods of crime.
Mr Odro said the situation called for crime fighters, “who are equally up to the challenge of matching operational capacity to be able to effectively deal with those crimes”.
Therefore, he said, the training workshop was a positive step towards enhancing the investigation capacity of EOCO with respect to insurance related fraud.
He said the reorganisation of the SFO into EOCO by President John Evans Atta Mills, was to put it in a better position to prevent the illegal dissipation of national resources by monitoring, investigating and bringing to book persons who dissipate the country’s economic and financial resources.
The Executive Director of EOCO, Mr Bia Dela Mortey Akpadzi, gave the assurance that his outfit was determined to rid the country of organised crime.
He said EOCO had planned a series of training programmes to build the capacity of the staff and instil a sense of professionalism and discipline in them to be able to detect and fight crime.
The President of the GIA, Mr Benjamin Acolatse, noted that practice of insurance world-wide had been bedevilled with all kinds of fraud and underhand dealings.
The Deputy Commissioner of the National Insurance Commission (NIC), Mr Nero Davor, who chaired the function stressed the need for the staff of EOCO to acquire more knowledge and skills needed to fight the sophisticated fraud in the insurance industry.