The Director-General of the Internal Audit Agency, Dr Eric Oduro-Osae, has challenged Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) to analyse the Auditor-General report and name cases they think deserve to be disallowed or surcharged.
Dr Eric Oduro-Asae commented following calls for the Auditor-General to use his constitutional powers of surcharge and disallowance on persons culpable for financial malfeasance.
Some CSOs including Ghana Centre for Democratic Governance (CDD-Ghana), Citizens Movement Against Corruption, Africa Education Watch, OccupyGhana, IMANI Africa, picketed around the office of the Auditor-General at Ministries in Accra last Monday, September 5, 2022.
Their action was in protest of the Auditor-General’s “blatant refusal to perform his constitutionally mandated duty to disallow unlawful public expenditure and surcharge persons implicated in the 2019 and 2020 Auditor-General’s reports.”
They deemed the inaction of the Auditor-General a “direct violation of Article 187 (7) of the 1992 Constitution of the Republic of Ghana.”
But responding to questions regarding the call by the CSOs, the Director-General of the Internal Audit Agency opined that the demand was to some extent unreasonable.
“It is not all recommendations that will require the Auditor-General to issue disallowance and surcharge. It is on a case-by-case basis,” he averred in an interview with Citi News.
“I will advise CSOs and OccupyGhana that if they want to help Ghanaians, they should do an analysis of the Auditor General’s report and establish the ones that they think are supposed to be disallowed and surcharged for which the Auditor General has refused to do and present that one as a credible case to Ghanaians. But to say the Auditor-General has failed to exercise his disallowance and surcharge under Article 187 is going too far.”
