Dr. Valentin Mensah
GOVERNANCE EXPERT Dr. Valentin Mensah, has said Auditor Generals, past and present, have found it difficult to comply with key aspects of the country’s laws on surcharge and disallowance because those made it impossible to recover public funds misappropriated by public officials.
Citing data and figures from the 2019 deliberations on the Ghana Audit Services 2020 Budget Estimates by the Special Budget Committee of Parliament, Dr. Mensah noted that, “Out of the amount of GHS 8,465,250,157 identified as irregularities in the various reports submitted to Parliament in 2018, only GHS67,315,066 (7.95%) had been recovered from the perpetrators.”
Dr. Mensah said the Supreme Court’s ruling on Occupy Ghana Vrs Attorney General [2017], has thrown the mandate of the Auditor General under Article 187(7)(b) of the 1992 Constitution and Section 17 of Act 584 to “disallow any item of expenditure which is contrary to law and surcharge the amount of any expenditure disallowed upon the person responsible for incurring or authorising the expenditure,” into the limelight.
However, the same Constitution in Article 187(9) also allows a person aggrieved by a disallowance or surcharge made by the A-G to appeal to the High Court under the High Court (Civil Procedure) Rules, 2016 (C.I. 102), Dr. Mensah contended.
Dr. Mensah, who is also the CEO of CBS Consulting, said Auditor Generals have always been found wanting when the persons against whom the certificates of surcharge and disallowance are issued trigger the appeal process.
He noted that it has become a challenge, largely because Auditor Generals do not always have the necessary documentations and sufficient audit evidence to back their allegations.
While admitting that heavy audit workloads for the reports on the audit of public accounts, meeting audit deadlines and sustaining quality were difficult challenges, Dr. Mensah said it was imperative that the Auditor General remained focused and obtain “sufficient appropriate audit evidence” before proceeding to publish his report on irregularities.
He said the board of the Ghana Audit Service “needs to introduce relevant amendments to the Audit Service Act and Regulations to incorporate the operationalization of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Surcharges and Disallowances.”
He said the A-G and the Audit Service must desist from being “a jack of all trades,” and must rather ‘direct the whole force of the mind to one particular object’ of auditing public accounts and issuing surcharges and disallowances, as stipulated the in Article 187 of the Constitution.
BY Jamila Akweley Okertchiri