A former Auditor-General, Daniel Yao Domelevo has described the summoning of public officials whose institutions have recorded financial irregularities in their operations before Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee as an exercise in futility.
According to him, what needs to be done is for the Auditor-General to exercise his power to surcharge public servants who supervise such infractions.
“Going to the Public Accounts Committee is a waste of time,” he said on TV3’s The KeyPoints on November 1.
Mr Domelevo explained that, “most of the time, they go in there, and they don’t show even a bit of remorse so that maybe I did something wrong. You find them smiling at us to show people that they are on TV.”
He therefore urged the Auditor-General to, instead, surcharge the heads of these institutions with the cost of the infractions.
“I think the constitution enjoins the Auditor-General, under clause 7 of Article 187, that in the performance of his duties, when he comes across any item of expenditure which is contrary to law, he should disallow and surcharge the person or persons involved. This, I think must be done and done properly,” he suggested.
He commended President Mahama for initiating steps to set up special purpose courts to fast-track the prosecution of such cases to serve as a deterrent to would be perpetrators.
“It is a very good initiative, and it will help us,” Mr Domelevo opined.
The anti-corruption crusader noted, however, that, “the court per se will not change anything. We need to change the way we do things. Are we going to allow these crimes to be decided over long periods? That you pray there is a change in government?”
He proposed that a law should be enacted to make things work differently.
“There is the need for a legislation to bring closure to a certain type of crime such that the judges must be given a time frame that they should finish trying the cases. Of course, lawyers would want to beat the system. So, we must be smarter than the lawyers by coming out with a law which prohibits stay of proceedings. You can’t stay proceedings. Prosecution must continue to a certain time,” he proposed.
Mr Domelevo added that, “a judge who goes beyond the time frame must be held accountable for misconduct, so that cases of this nature can be tried expeditiously.
He further suggested “the court must be dedicated exclusively for such offences.”
Mr Domelevo’s comments come on the back of revelations by the Attorney-General in relations to infractions detected at the National Signals Bureau, National Service Authority and National Food and Buffer stock Authority running into billions of cedis.
He also recommended that the Internal Audit Agency Act must be amended.
“Internal audit is the control over all the controls. They have the statutory duty to ensure that all the controls are working as expected, so that the money would be used for the intended purpose and in line with the regulations. So, we must amend the Internal Audit Agency Act- take the internal auditor out of the control of the principal spending officer, which is the best practice internationally, so that they can be a good check. Because they are in there before the Auditor-General starts his audit- the expenditure would have been incurred several months if not years ago,” he explained.
“So, the internal auditor is there, at times not even to recover but to prevent the occurrence of the wrongful act,” Mr Domelevo stressed.
