GHc 7 Billion Gone Missing From State Coffers! - Veep Discloses

Seven billion Ghana cedis is missing from State financial coffers, Vice President Dr. Bawumia has revealed. The Vice President, Mahamudu Bawumia, addressing a gathering at the Launch of the "Good Corporate Governance Initiative" at the Kempinski Hotel in Accra, was alarmed by the level of misappropriation that characterized the previous government. According to him, as the new government makes preparation of the budget for the 2017 fiscal year; there's a huge concern regarding how the country's finances have been mismanaged. He quoted that Ghana's economy could not thrive well without a proper economic data on the country's revenues and expenditure. Dr. Bawumia therefore made a shocking disclosure that as the government "interrogated the data to see exactly why our public finances are in the state they are, we found out that there is GHC 7 billion of expenditures that have not been disclosed. And I'm talking 7 billion [so] in the year 2016 and these come from 2014, 2015, 2016." "So, where have they been hiding all these years and how are you supposed to manage an economy with faulty data?" he rhetorically asked. In view of this, the Vice President indicated that the government has implemented some measures to check the indiscriminate expenditure in the country. "We've done a lot of Auditor General reports and they're gathering dust. And the reports have so much billions of cedis that need to be refunded to the State and we've not pursued a lot of these reports...So, I've asked for some work to be done. "...we also need a lot of integrity. In the management of any economy, there's nothing that can beat the integrity of your economic data because it's with data that you plan. If you don't have data, you have major problems and this is why we really need to emphasize the integrity of data," he said. He reinforced the need for accountability and transparency in State coffers, saying "we've been less than a month in office but we've taken some steps to accelerate the implementation of some measures to ensure accountability, transparency and integrity in the government. There's a lot more to do."

Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi /Peacefmonline.com/Ghana