Audit Service to undertake procurement and contract audit

By Afedzi Abdullah,
GNA

Elmina (C/R), July
17, GNA – 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
on Monday.

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.

GNA

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