The Director-General of the National Communications Authority, Edmund Yirenkyi Fianko, has outlined specific irregularities identified in SIM registration data, citing them as part of the basis for the re-registration exercise.
Speaking on Hot Issues, he said the review uncovered cases where identity details were duplicated but linked to different biometric records.
“In some cases, we found two cards with the same name, same date of birth, and same PIN, but different photos,” he said. “So one of them should be fake, it is not possible.”
He explained that the Ghana Card PIN is designed to be a unique identifier, making such overlaps unlikely under normal circumstances.
“It is not possible for the PIN to be the same because the PIN is the unique identifier,” he said. “Even if names are the same, the card number should be different. If the number is the same, it must belong to one person.”
He added that these findings emerged from a limited data check conducted to guide decision-making.
“We just took a sample to check to decide whether to go or not to go. We took a very small sample of 2.3 million,” he said.
According to him, the results showed that only a portion of the records aligned under facial verification.
“Even with the facial matches of that sample, only 81% matched,” he stated.
While noting that the sample was not representative of the entire dataset, he said it was sufficient to highlight underlying concerns.
“It is not a representative sample because it was very small compared to the total registrations,” he said. “At least, that confirmed that there were issues with the existing database that needed to be cleaned up.”
