By Clement Atagra

NOTWITHSTANDING the promulgation of various laws to close the loopholes in the financial misappropriation of public resources, public officials have designed disingenuous ways of circumventing the process, Samuel Sallas-Mensah, former chairman of the Parliamentary Accounts Committee (PAC), has said.

He said, realising that misappropriation is an area of concern in the management of public funds, laws such as the Internal Audit Act, the Financial Administration Act and Regulation and the Public Procurement Act, had been passed to minimise, if not eliminate it, but those laws do not appear to be addressing the problems very much due to new tricks adopted by public officials.

Mr Sallas-Mensah was speaking at a day’s workshop organised by the Ghana Anti-Corruption Coalition, in collaboration with KPMG, an international auditing and accounting firm for members of the PAC in Accra yesterday.

It was under the theme, ‘Effective financial management in the public sector: The role of parliamentary committee on finance and public accounts’ and was aimed at highlighting the role of the PAC in ensuring that there is an effective management of public resources.

Mr Sallas-Mensah cited a case when an accounts officer of one of the MDAs doctored cheques meant for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) into his name and paid huge sums of monies into his personnel account.

“The stock of trade was to prepare the cheques in an abbreviated form for IRS and after obtaining the signature of his boss, he wrote them again in a new name as I.R. Samuel,” he explained.

He said other processes used by public officers to misappropriate funds is to withhold document that they are aware may implicate them, from auditors.

“They often argue that they are unable to find the documents due to mis-filing among other excuses,” he said.

He explained however that after auditing, these documents are usually found and upon examination, detected to be new sets of documents hurriedly prepared to cover old transactions.

Realising the pervasive nature of this trend therefore, Sallas-Mensah said the PAC resolved not to accept documents that were not made available to the external auditors at the time of audit.

He also mentioned poor supervision of accounting officers and officers with custody of public funds, the limited time available for the PAC to gather information and inadequate support staff as some of the challenges confronting the committee.

Mr. Sallas-Mensah challenged Members of Parliament, particularly PAC members to assert themselves by making sure that the executive take them more serious in terms of resourcing them.

He said Parliament had always approved budget estimates for the various MDAs without first demanding that their needs are met in terms of resources for their work.

“The executive always want to have its way through so you the members of PAC must sit up and assert yourselves,” he told them.

A senior partner of KPMG, Joseph B. Winful, stressed the need for the auditors of accounts to ensure proper use of public resources.

He said parliament represents the people to manage state resources and are also custodians of national assets and so have a significant role to play in ensuring accountability in the use of public resources.

Mr Winful mentioned effective planning, effective execution, monitoring and reporting as areas that parliament must work at seriously to ensure that the ordinary people benefit significantly from it.