The Director of Operation at the Ghana Internal Audit Agency (IAA), Mr. Nathan Yankey has revealed that some internal auditors are poisoned and killed for doing their jobs effectively.
He related how a member of the agency’s staff had his meal poisoned and was killed shortly after eating since he was tasked with safeguarding public funds.
“Corruption will fight whoever fights corruption hence, people who risk their lives to fight corruption must be provided with security both personal and job security. Sometimes they have to think of what will happen to them when they bring out issues to the extent that sometimes people are poisoned to the extent of even losing their lives,” he told Alfred Ocansey on the Sunrise show on 3FM Thursday August 11.
According to Mr. Yankey, the Internal Audit Agency is forced to operate with a workforce of 61 instead of 120 owing to a lack of permanent office space and sufficient funding. “We lack funds and depend on donor agencies for funding” Yankey mentioned.
“We hope that ones we get the necessary support we need, we will be able to safeguard the public purse by putting in all stop gap measures in place to work efficiently” he stated
The Ghana Internal Audit Agency recovered about 380 million cedis in 2021 and over 600 million in the first and second quarters of 2022 as a result of increased measures to prevent misappropriation of public monies.
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He explained that if we can work on streamlining and getting public officials to comply with public sector financial management systems, it will help prevent a great deal of financial irregularities, as it is costly to allow things to occur before pursuing the perpetrators, as in the case of external audit reports, which take a year or more and are always paid for in arrears.
“If we are looking at how we can work quickly in real time to be able to prevent this from happening, then that’s where the internal audit function comes in” Nathan Yankey iterated.
SOURCE: 3NEWS
