Education Ministry chases TANIT Ltd over GH¢859, 115 refund

The Ministry of Education has asked information technology company, TANIT Limited, to refund GH¢859, 115.46, which it received back to the State. The company received the money as a result of a contract to provide digital teacher training content and platform in 2021, a contract it failed to honour.

This was contained in a statement released by the Ministry, last week. Another letter dated July 18, 2022, also conveyed the Ministry’s reminder to the company to refund all payments as they did not perform their obligation under the contract agreement, which was supposed to have been completed five months.

Contract

The Ministry expected TANIT Ltd to perform each of the five deliverables and submit a claim for work done at each stage, as spelled out in the contract.

“This includes a submission of inception report by August 2021 attracting payment of 15 per cent of the contract sum which was met by TANIT Ltd; Design, construct and build a platform for the training of teachers online by September, 2021 attracting payment of 25 per cent,” portions of the statement said.

It was also expected to develop and build curriculum design by October 2021, attracting 20 per cent payment, operationalise a dashboard, sign off and go live by November 2021, also attracting payment of 20 percent, while a consultant was required to stay on board for additional two months, after the project went live for quality assurance, attracting the remaining 20 percent.

The Ministry further disclosed that the bone of contention is that TANIT Ltd did not submit monthly reports for the remaining four deliverables but rather lumped the four reports together and requested the payment of the remaining Gh4,940,827.72, constituting 85 per cent of the contract sum, on February 14, 2022, when the contract was supposed to have completed by January 2022.

The Ministry mentioned that TANIT Ltd’s contract was not terminated as speculated but rather expired, forcing the Ministry to seek support from another source for the successful execution of the project.

The Ministry stressed that it did not cook up figures, as speculated, but gave actual training figures to merit the payment of the project fund from the World Bank.