Awelana Addah, the Programmes Manager of Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII), has observed that the damning Auditor General’s report should be attributed to weakness in supervisory role of the Internal Audit Agency at the various levels of the state.
She explained that it was not surprising the Auditor General had come out with the damning findings which was seen continuously over the years exposing violations and infractions which indicated lots of weaknesses in internal controls.
“The damning findings of the Auditor General have become commonplace year after year, and shows no signs of stopping soon and there is need for sanctions in the report to recover lost resources and prosecute offenders to serve as deterrent to other state officials,” Ms Addah lamented.
However, she noted that the current Auditor General had shied away from prescribing surcharges and disallowances as part of the report, a situation which had riled the ire of many anti-graft campaigners and organisations, due to absence of those indirectly contributed to the impunity in state machinery.
According to her, even though Parliament’s role had been speaking eloquently about it, delay in some of the hearings were not good enough for promotion of sunlight on probity, transparency, accountability and sanctions adding that “sometimes it happens people move on and transit which becomes difficult to track who was the culprit so Parliament as well as Public Accounts Committee need to sit up”.
Ms Addah suggested that probity, accountability and transparency in activities of state institutions and agencies avoid situations where people got away with infractions and lack of political will to ensure people were sanctioned although the Auditor General’s report came out with recommendations for the head of entity to put in place mechanisms to recover the monies.
“It is seriously inadequate because the Auditor General has powers to disallow, surcharge and powers to ensure whatever he wants done to recover monies is done within the law but for us we believe because people are not sanctioned enough, not just by Auditor General, but also at official level when it comes to Audit Committee.
“Parliament must sit up and deal with backlog of Auditor General’s reports at Public Accounts Committee in order to bring probity, transparency, accountability and sanctions needed,” Ms Addah stressed.
