Koforidua, Feb. 15, GNA - Fifty workers of the Ghana Audit Service in the Eastern Region, has began a two-day training programme on the use of manual for auditing accounts and operations of the Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs).

The training, which was organized by the Audit Service and sponsored jointly by the Government of Ghana and the Danish International Development (DANIDA) on Monday, aims to train 500 participants from all regional and district offices nationwide.

Speaking at the opening ceremony, Mr Kwamina Eku Ghansah, acting Deput= y Auditor General, Pre-University Educational Institutions and District Assemblies, noted that under the Government decentralization and local government reforms, MMDAs had been assigned wide range of responsibilities, including the provision of basic social services and infrastructure. He said additionally, MMDAs were responsible for the coordination of local economic development, adding that, they had a critical role in addressing national poverty reduction objectives and achieving the Millennium Development Goals.

He said in order to bridge financial gap and to improve the performance of the MMDAs, the Government introduced a performance based grant (The District Development Fund modality) where funds were linked to regular performance assessment under the Functional and Organizational Assessment Tool (FOAT).

Mr Ghansah said the Ghana Audit Service had a responsibility to audit the MMDAs and any other beneficiary institution or accounts' holders of t= he District Development Fund (DDF). He said one major problem of the Service was that, the district audit staff lacked capacity to undertake the operational audit at the district level.

Mr Ghansah said DANIDA then decided to support a five year capacity building programme to equip the district audit staff with the requisite capacity and to undertake pilot operational audits of DANIDA funded project= s in 44 district assemblies in five regions under the Local Service Delivery and Governance Programme starting from 2009. He noted that, DANIDA's support to Ghana Audit Service involved the production of audit manual for the audit of MMDAs and the training of 200 district audit staff in financial and operational or performance audit and the update of audit guidelines. Mr Ghansah said the main benefit of using the manual for the audit of MMDAs was to bring uniformity and standardization into the audit of MMDAs. He expressed the Service's profound gratitude to DANIDA for providin= g the financial support for the preparation of the audit manual and the training programmes, as well as the acquisition of some logistics such as laptops, pen drives and stationery for the staff.