When Ghana’s Auditor-General released his 2024 annual report, the numbers were
staggering. Financial irregularities totalling GH₴18.4 billion had been uncovered across the public sector.

Billions more — GH₴8.1 billion, to be precise — were rejected from government claims submitted to the Ministry of Finance after a special audit conducted in partnership with international firms EY and PwC found them to be falsified or unsupported.

The question no one seems to want to ask aloud is this: Where were the
internal auditors?

They exist in every ministry. They are enshrined in law. They are, in theory, the first and most critical line of defence against financial misconduct in Ghana’s public sector.

And yet, year after year, billions vanish on their watch.

The Framework That Exists on Paper

Ghana is not without structure when it comes to internal auditing. The Internal Audit Agency (IAA), established by the Internal Audit Agency Act, 2003 (Act 658), was created as a central body to coordinate, facilitate, and provide quality assurance for internal audit activities across Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs) and Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies (MMDAs).

On paper, it is a robust architecture. In January 2025, Ghana became the first country in the world to officially adopt the Global Internal Audit Standards (GIAS), launched jointly by the IAA and the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA).

Dr Eric Oduro Osae, the then Director-General of the IAA, declared that internal auditors were “the backbone of good financial governance in the country."

Conferences are held. Speeches are made. Standards are adopted. And still, the money walks out the door.

Reporting to the People They Should Be Auditing

At the heart of the dysfunction is a structural contradiction that governance experts have long flagged but that politicians have been slow to fix.

In Ghana, internal auditors within MDAs report administratively to the Heads of those same Ministries and Government Agencies — the very officials whose financial decisions they are meant to scrutinise.

They report functionally to Audit Committees, but the funding for their audit programmes comes directly from the budgets of the agencies they audit.

“Internal auditors are weakened by employer dominance and political interference,” one governance commentator noted in a widely-cited analysis.

“They are supposed to serve as watchmen, safeguarding government revenue and ensuring proper disbursement of public funds. Instead, they are embedded within the very systems they are meant to guard.”

Underfunded, Undertrained, and Overlooked

Independence is not the only problem. Research into internal audit practice across Ghana’s public sector paints a picture of a profession that is starved of resources and professional development.

Studies have consistently found that internal audit units across government face understaffing, restricted access to financial records, insufficient technical skills, limited professional training, and inadequate budgets.

A 2025 academic study on internal audit challenges in Ghana found significant negative correlations between these systemic barriers and actual audit performance.

In simpler terms: the more hamstrung an internal audit unit is, the less effective it becomes. And in Ghana’s government sector, many units are very hamstrung indeed.

When Findings Go Nowhere

Even when Ghana’s internal — and external — auditors do their work, the results
frequently disappear into the bureaucratic ether. The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of Parliament has repeatedly observed that many MDAs simply fail to implement recommendations from audit reports.

Investigations have identified a “complex interplay of organisational, political, and attitudinal factors” that prevent audit findings from being acted upon.

The 2024 Auditor-General’s report — which flagged outstanding debts and loans
recoverable worth GH₴12.5 billion, alongside an under-payment of revenue by the
Electricity Company of Ghana exceeding GH₴1.2 billion — is the latest in a long line of such reports that have exposed the gap between the discovery of irregularities and accountability for them.

Ghana’s audit system is generating findings. What it is not generating,
consistently, is consequences.

The Compliance Gap at the Local Level

The challenge is most acute at the district and local government level. Internal audit capacity in Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies is considerably weaker than at the national level.

The spread of trained internal auditors across Ghana’s many MMDAs is uneven, and in some areas, internal audit units exist in name only — chronically understaffed and operating without meaningful oversight.

This matters enormously because a significant portion of Ghana’s public funds — for schools, clinics, roads, and social services — is disbursed and managed at the local level.

Weak audit capacity here means that leakages are less likely to be detected and more likely to persist.

A Profession in Search of Its Voice

Ghana’s internal auditors are not, by and large, corrupt or indifferent. Many are professionals working diligently within deeply constrained systems.

The 2024 Annual Internal Audit Conference, themed “Consolidating Democratic and Accountable Governance in Ghana: Role of Internal Auditors,” brought together practitioners grappling seriously with these challenges.

The Director-General of the IAA charged auditors to “lead by example” — an acknowledgment that the profession’s integrity must come from within, even as external conditions make that harder.

What Reform Could Look Like

Some voices are now calling for more radical restructuring. One widely-discussed
proposal — the Independent Professionalized Audit-as-a-Service (IPAAS) model —
would see internal audits outsourced to independent professional firms licensed by the Institute of Chartered Accountants, Ghana.

Supervised by a multi-agency oversight committee drawn from the Auditor-General, the Office of the Special Prosecutor, EOCO, and others, audit firms would rotate across institutions to prevent collusion, while a central digital platform would publish findings in real time for civil society and journalists to track.

Others advocate for amending Act 658 to give the IAA genuine supervisory teeth — the authority not merely to coordinate and advise, but to compel compliance and escalate failures to Parliament and law enforcement.

The 2025 amendment to the Public Financial Management Act, which embedded fiscal rules and established an Independent Fiscal Council, signals that the appetite for reform exists.

The Billions as a Mirror

Ghana’s GH₴18.4 billion in 2024 irregularities is not simply a statistic. It is a mirror held up to a system that has the architecture of accountability without many of its essential supports.

Internal auditors are in Ghana’s government sector. They are at their desks, writing reports, filing findings, attending conferences, and adopting international standards.

What they often lack is the independence to act freely, the resources to act thoroughly, the authority to compel cooperation, and the institutional support to ensure that when they raise the alarm, someone in power actually listens.

Until those conditions change, the watchmen will remain — present in
name, constrained in practice, and outpaced by the scale of the problem
they are asked to solve.