President John Mahama has indicated that he will hold a crunch meeting with the Auditor-General, Chief Justice and the Attorney-General to discuss deterrent measures to curb the financial irregularities recorded in the Auditor-General’s report on yearly basis.
Over time, loses reported by the Auditor-General have increased.
Speaking at the 12th Annual Governing Boards and Chief Directors and executives conference in Ho, the President said the whip must be cracked.
“Recently I’ve been watching the Public Accounts Committee and it’s so pathetic, you know, why must we every year congregate at the Public Accounts Committee and then you hear all kinds of atrocious, you know, things. I mean recklessness with public funds and resources.
And so I have a meeting on Thursday with the Chief Justice, the Attorney-General and others to find a final solution to this Auditor General’s report,” he said.
The President bemoaned the fact that, “…
persons who infract, are found guilty of infractions or do not follow due procedure or lead to loss of public resources, we must have a fast-track process to Nsawam. Fast track, before you see you are in Nsawam, six months, you know, until we do that, until there’s deterrence, we’re going to come every year and they say total misappropriation and infractions found out by the Auditor-General is about GHC15 billion.
He noted that, “…if we save GHC 15 billion can you imagine what it could do, you know? And so we’re going to have a meeting, we’re going to bring some, we’ve not fully implemented the constitutional provision. There’s a part of the provision that says after the Public Accounts Committee has sat on the Auditor-General’s report, Parliament must set up a committee. What we don’t know is whether it should be a parliamentary committee or it’s a committee not necessarily made of parliamentarians to implement the findings of the Auditor General.”
