Audit Service to Undertake Procurement & Contract Audit

The Ghana Audit Service (GAS) is to undertake procurement and contract audit to ensure that contracting and procurement activities are consistent with the procurement law.

Mr. Daniel Yaw Domelevo, the Auditor-General, said the goal was to make sure that, goods and services or contracts were carried out in a manner that enhanced access, competition, fairness and resulted in best value to the people of Ghana.

He was speaking at the launch of the “National Payroll and Personnel Verification Audit” at Elmina.

He said the procurement and contract audit also formed part of the Public Financial Management Reform (PFMR) aimed at promoting fiscal discipline, strategic allocation of resources and efficient service delivery.

The GAS in collaboration with the Controller and Accountant General had embarked on a nationwide payroll audit as part of efforts to eliminate ghost names from the government’s payroll.

“In future the exercise will not be limited to the payroll but will be extended to procurement and contracts to promote effective, efficient and economical use of public resources to propel national development” Mr Domelevo added.

He noted that between 10,000 and 12,000 workers on the payroll resigned, died or went on pension, every year, something, which required that the payroll was continuously cleansed, while systems were put place to ensure its credibility.

He warned that a “disallowed expenditure” would be issued on payrolls found with ghost names and surcharged as well.

Mr Dovelevo called for all work together to protect the national purse not only with the payroll but in the fight against corruption.

“Anywhere or any place you are seeing wastage of government resources, please reach out to us and we will be there. Because if we don’t save the resources and we allow them to continue going to waste, this country will remain as it is today.”

“You look at Ghana in the midst of plenty, yet we are living in abject poverty because a few people greedily take everything for themselves and they do not care .We owe it a duty to ourselves to stand up and fight against this.”

Mr Kwamena Duncan, Central Regional Minister, said although some achievement had been made in cleaning the payroll data, new strategies continued to be developed by some unscrupulous people to short-change the nation.

He pointed out that financial leakages in the system were a threat to national development and asked everybody to support the efforts of the GAS and the Controller and Accountant Generals Department to clean payroll.

He commended the GAS for the initiative and added that protecting the national purse was a collective responsibility.

Dr Mohammed Saani Abdulai, Project Director, PFMR Project, Ministry of Finance, said public sector wage bill continued to be the biggest concern of the government, accounting for about 44.7 per cent of the total revenue of the nation.

This could not continue and therefore the need for the payroll audit.

He said the exercise was being carried out by the GAS with support from the Ghana Integrated Financial Management Information System (GIFMIS) under the auspices of the World Bank.

Mr George Winful, Deputy Auditor General and Team Leader of the enumeration exercise, announced that 51,000 workers out of the 600,000 to be enumerated were in the Central Region.

Source: GNA