Whistle Blowers of financial impropriety stands to gain 10 per cent of the total amount recovered from their disclosure under the Act,Charles Ayamdo, Director of Anti-corruption ofthe Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) has said.
He pointed out that Ghana’s reward mechanism was meant to encourage people to be proactive in whistle blowing premised on public interest and for public good.
Mr Ayamdo said this at a stakeholders’ sensitization workshop on the Whistle Blowers Act and Procurement Standard Clause organized by the Office of the Attorney General and Ministry of Justice in Accra yesterday.
Participants were drawn from the Ministries, Departments, and Agencies together with some Civil Society Organisation to deliberate on how best to see the red flags and make disclosures.
Mr Ayamdo said the Act also envisaged that those who were prepared to report wrongdoings would be ready to disclose their identity rather than submit the complaints as anonymous.
He saw the law deeply frowns on anonymous applications that was why CHRAJ had been mandated to provide protection for whistle blowers against victimisation and retribution.
Mr Ayamdo said the Witness Act had come to complement the protection measures CHRAJ had in place by law to ward off victimisation and threat to life by ensuring that if it even means changing the identity of the person or relocating the whistle blower to another country, it could be made possible.
He said CHRAJ core mandate to protect whistle blowers was expected to conduct enquiries into complaints of being victimized, especially, in employee-employer feud and make orders for reinstatement, reversal of any transfer and in dire situation transfer the person to another public institution.
Mr Ayamdo however said the whistle blower would not be protected in any way if the information contained in the disclosure was false and the disclosure was made with malicious intent.
He said the law also allowed the right of action for being victimised after the complaints have first been submitted to the Commission.
Alhaji Abdul-Latif Alhassan, Audit and Investigation Specialist at the Public Procurement Authority took participants through the tenets lawful procurement processes indicating red flags to put whistle blower on red alert to trigger the process of whistle blowing.
BY LAWRENCE MARKWEI
