By William
Yaw Owusu
Wednesday
October 03, 2018
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.”
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