According to Mr. Nathan Yankey, Director of Operations at the Ghana Internal Audit Agency (IAA), some internal auditors are poisoned or killed for carrying out their duties well.
He related how one of the agency’s officers suffered food poisoning that resulted in his death shortly after eating because he was making sure that the public funds were secure.
“Since corruption will fight whoever fights it, those who risk their lives to do so must be given security—both personal and employment security. He stated to Alfred Ocansey on the Sunrise show on 3FM that “sometimes they have to think of what would happen to them when they bring out issues to the level that sometimes people are poisoned to the extent of even losing their lives.”
According to Mr. Yankey, the Internal Audit Agency is compelled to work with a staff strength of 61 instead of 120 due to lack of permanent office accommodation and adequate funds. “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 retrieved over 380 million cedis in 2021 and over 600 million within the first and second quarters of 2022 as more efforts are being made to ensure that state funds are not abused.
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 lot of financial irregularities because it is expensive to allow the things to happen before we go after the culprits as in the case of external audit reports which takes a year or more and always in arrears for the state to spend.
“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.
