Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia has announced that 533 personnel who are paid by the Controller and Accountant General’s Department (CAGD) have been determined to have numerous identities.
He claims that in any situation where there are several identities, there are multiple CAGD accounts with various employee numbers. He said that the inconsistencies were discovered last week during the preliminary stage of an effort by the National Identification Authority (NIA) and the CAGD to compare the personnel database with the Ghana Card.
Vice President Bawumia said yesterday in Accra at the Internal Audit Agency (IAA) conference that 148,060 of the 610,000 employees on payroll did not match anyone in the NIA database. He stated that although it was presumed that the unmatched employees had not yet applied for their Ghana Cards, the CAGD and Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) will also carry out a similar database matching exercise to ascertain the actual status of the names on the payroll.
He said that a report on the irregularities was currently being created so that investigative authorities might look into and prosecute anyone who was shown to have committed fraud. The conference’s theme for this year was “Injecting Fiscal Discipline in Resource Mobilization and Utilisation for Sustainable Development: The Role of Internal Auditors.”
To address the government’s efforts to increase revenue mobilization and its appropriate utilization, it gathered together heads of state institutions, government officials, officers of the IAA, academics, private sector stakeholders, etc. Vice President Bawumia noted that the government was constructing the system as part of measures to combat corruption, including linking national databases to increase revenue and reduce costs in public expenditure.
He said that as a result, the SSNIT has saved GH320 million since 2018 through a biometric audit, while the National Service Scheme (NSS) has identified 14,000 phantom workers, saving the nation GH112 million every year. He claimed that internal auditors’ function as the covered companies’ gatekeepers of financial discipline was crucial in ensuring that the necessary controls were in place and operating effectively while alerting management to potential hazards in public spending.
Internal auditors’ proactive engagement in the public sector improves fiscal responsibility and has helped the country save millions of cedis. By their counsel and vigilance, the vice president claimed, “public sector waste and abuses have been minimized and annual breaches disclosed by the Auditor-General have experienced improvement.”some degree of decrease between 2019 and 202.”
To do this, he stated that the government would continue to reform and reposition internal audits in the public sector as a crucial institution for public financial management. This would encourage public servants to exercise fiscal restraint when using taxpayer money. To reform and reposition public sector internal auditing for better resource mobilization and utilization, Joseph B. Winful, Chairman of the Board of the IAA, encouraged Parliament to swiftly pass the Internal Audit Service Bill.
The IAA will launch End to End Audit Management Information System (AMIS) in the coming year with the support of partners to fully automate public sector internal auditing, receive, analyze, and process internal audit reports and recommendations on a real-time basis, he said.
This will be in line with the restructuring of the public sector internal auditing to move away from conventional pre-auditing to a risk-based system. “The system would support integration and interaction with the current Ghana Integrated Financial Management Information System (GIFMIS) to facilitate effective internal auditing and financial reporting,” the speaker continued.
IAA Director General Dr. Eric OduroOsae said that the Agency was collaborating with the Accountant General’s Office to crack down on payroll fraud through monthly payroll cleaning. He declared that the IAA and the Economic and Organized Crime Office (EOCO) had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the swift prosecution of people and organizations included in internal audit reports for different irregularities and the recovery of lost funds. To inspire employees and advance industrial harmony, he asked for a reassessment of the terms of employment for internal auditors.
