Isaac Adongo is the MP for Bolga Central
The Member of Parliament for Bolga Central, Isaac Adongo, has declared his lack of confidence in the system used by the Auditor-General in auditing government accounts.
According to him, the current audit system does not offer assurance that discrepancies will be addressed.
He noted that, instead, the Auditor-General’s system pretends to be working.
Adongo said if the system does not prosecute persons found guilty of wrongdoing, it is fundamentally flawed.
His comments come on the back of the recent Auditor-General’s Report on government accounts.
The report showed overstatements and understatements of the government’s finances alongside various leakages in the public sector, amounting to over GH¢17.4 billion.
“I’ve never had confidence in the kind of system we are operating. We are basically pretending to be exercising assurance, but the system that we are operating itself doesn’t lend itself to proper assurance,” Adongo was quoted by myjoyonline.com to have said.
He bemoaned the inability of the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament to prosecute culprits, calling them toothless.
“The Parliament of Ghana is toothless when the auditor reports to it and simply engages in talk shows without prosecutorial powers. They don’t have those powers, and Parliament is the employer of the auditor. So, yes, there’s independence of the auditor away from the executive, but to what end? That is where the problem is,” he added.
Adongo also noted that the audit goes through a process where irregularities are flagged by auditors, then agencies are given opportunities to explain.
They are also given an “exit conference” and a formal “management letter” indicating unresolved issues.
The Bolga MP noted that the process only leads to mere directives to “go and implement these recommendations so that you don’t see any more. You go and you go and sleep”.
He added that the internal auditors are often HND holders, who are expected to police sophisticated financial controllers, lawyers, and engineers, often in situations where they are poorly remunerated.
“At the end of the day, they are not able to do anything. The following year, it is repeated on a large scale,” he said.
SSD/AE
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