Johnson Asiedu Nketia
Opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) has made a spurious claim that the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) government has blown $6million on financial audits.
It is unclear how the NDC came by the figure but they claim it was the cost of financial audits they termed ‘witch hunting’ exercise which they purport is targeted at NDC appointees; describing it as ‘illegal’.
The NDC’s main concern is the recent leaked report which implicated some NDC gurus who headed and managed six state-owned companies and institutions.
The companies audited included Ghana National Gas Company (GNGC), Microfinance and Small Loans Centre (MASLOC), Ghana Free Zones Board (GFZB), Bulk Oil Storage and Transportation Company (BOST), Ghana Standards Authority (GSA) and the Ghana Technology University College (GTUC).
Documents available showed that the forensic audits were conducted by reputable international private auditing firms which detected massive looting of state resources through procurements and deliberate stealing of money, running into several billion Ghana cedis.
According to the auditors, there were massive breaches of the Public Procurement Act, 2003 (Act 663) and the Public Procurement (Amendment) Act, 2016 (Act 914) some of which were “inflation of contracts sums and non-performance of contracts. Others include non-enforcement and breach of contracts.”
The auditors also discovered “breach of the provision of the Financial Administration Regulation, 2004 (L.I. 1802), such as cash disbursement without authorization, deposit of public funds into personal accounts and failing to account for accountable travelling allowances.”
At a news conference in Accra yesterday, NDC General Secretary, Johnson Asiedu Nketia claimed that the government contracted audit firms to do the same work reserved for the Auditor-General and other investigative bodies of the state.
“We have credible information that these private firms were not legally engaged since they were not officially authorised by the Auditor-General,” he said.
Without showing documents to indicate the $6million cost build-up, the NDC scribe said the NPP government has so far paid six million dollars to these private firms which constitute a waste of scarce resources.
He attacked Prof. Edward Dua Agyeman, the former Auditor General who the report captured as Chairman of the Cabinet Committee Responsible for the Coordination of Forensic Audits and called for his removal.
“Dua Agyemang does not have the integrity and character to undertake such an assignment. The person who has been appointed by Nana Akufo-Addo to chair the Audit Service Board and who has been asked to recruit these private firms in the name of cabinet committee secretary is the one who has now been recycled to chair the audit service board to fight corruption.”
He alleged that the Board Chairman of the Audit Service is not clean, saying “in 1983, Dua Agyemang was banned by the Institute of Chartered Accountants Ghana from practicing accountancy and auditing in Ghana for forging an audit report for a private firm whose accounts he had neither seen nor audited. The same Dua Agyemang, in 1986 led a team to conduct special investigations and at the end of the exercise, he presented a forged report causing some heads of departments to suffer unjustly.”
By William Yaw Owusu