Judgment Debt Commission’s report may not be implemented - GII

The Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII) is worried that two years into its work, the Judgement Debt Commission has not yet completed its work meant to last for a year. Thus the GII is afraid that the final report will suffer the fate of other reports such as the Auditor General's and many which are not implemented.

The Executive Director of GII, Vitus Adaboo Azeem, posed a series of rhetorical questions to drive home the point: “Is the report going to be different from other past reports that were- unfortunately -not acted upon? How much of taxpayers' monies have been lost through avoidable judgment debts? Will the commission be able to order people who were found to have been wrongly paid judgment debts to refund these monies?”

Mr. Vitus Azeem was speaking at the launch of a report dubbed “Show Me the Money” in Accra. The report forms part of GII's project of engaging the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of Parliament on its role in the implementation of the recommendations of the Auditor General's report, and providing capacity building and sensitisation programmes for selected Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) across the country.

The Judgement Debt Commission was established by President John Dramani Mahama to look into the causes of judgments debts that have plagued the country over the years.

Albert Kan-Dapaah, former Member of Parliament for Afigya-Sekyere West constituency and ex-chair of the PAC who took the gathering through the report, indicated that there were so many irregularities in the finances of the various MDAs that must be addressed.

He disclosed that the Ministry of Justice and Attorney General, for example, had made payments to security officials to the tune of GHc 196,900 in 2011 as overtime allowances, but the amount was not subjected to the deduction of ten per cent withholding tax of GHc 19,690. In addition, payment vouchers with face value of GH c 896,649 were not presented for examination by the auditors. Kan-Dapaah explained that Section 30 of the Audit Service Act, 2000 (Act 584) provided that bodies and organisations, including MDAs which were subjected to audit by the Auditor General, must establish Audit Report Implementation Committees (ARICs).

The function of ARICs is to ensure that the recommendations in all audit reports, including but not limited to the Auditor General's Report, internal audit reports and reports of internal financial monitoring units are implemented. He stated that most of the Ministries had not complied with this law.

He expressed concerns about the composition of the ARICs as they are made of “big men and women from the same organisation.”