Sometime within the next 48 hours, the Minister of Finance Mr. Ken Ofori Atta will appear before parliament to present the Budget Statement of the Government of Ghana for the 2022 Financial Year.
It is likely that that budget statement would contain the introduction of new taxes, the increment of existing taxes, or the re-imposition or re-introduction of abandoned taxes.
The Daily Searchlight is suggesting to the people’s parliament, and then to the people of Ghana, that we should completely reject any such proposals by the government, until, and unless the Finance Minister, the Finance Ministry and the government is able to give deliverable assurances on how it intends to redeem itself in the face of the findings made in the Reports of the Auditor-General on the Public Accounts of Ghana (General Government) for the financial years ended 31st December 2019 and 2020.
We believe, that given the level of financial and monetary losses and lapses identified in the 2019 and 2020 reports of the Auditor General, it would be totally unacceptable for the government to seek to impose any additional taxes and hardship on the people of Ghana without clear and unambiguous assurances on how the government intends to address these losses and lapses.
There is a saying that one can never fill even a cup fully with water, even if the source was the whole sea, if the tool one is using to fetch the water is a basket. No amount of money would be satisfactory in the case of Ghana, if the level of unbridled revenue leakage identified in the 2019 and 2020 Auditor-General’s Reports, is allowed to go on.
Let us identify a few of these leakages;
- In the 2020, the Auditor General stated that Ghana lost an amount of GHc 12, 856,172,626.00 due to what the Auditor General termed as irregularities. This report was transmitted to the Speaker of Parliament on 31st May, 2021, nearly six months ago. The Minister of Finance has not said a word on how he intends to redeem this colossal sum of money.
- Again, the 2019 Audit Report of Public Accounts of Government states at Page 16, under the heading ‘Avoidable Penalty and Commitment Fees Payment on Loans’, that Ghana lost a whopping GHc38, 294,627.27.
- In the same Audit Report, under Budget Overruns on page 11, the Auditor General stated that the review of the accounts of 20 MDAs revealed excess expenditures of their goods and services, compensation, and non-financial assets over the revised budget allocation by a total of GH¢2,192,903,767, GH¢5,730,944,462, and GH¢2,757,212,325 respectively. Examples of some of the MDAs that engaged in overruns were the Ministry of Finance itself that overrun its budget by 122.0%, Ministry of Sanitation by a scandalous 549.9%, and Ministry of Regional Integration by a breath-taking 1173.9%, the Office of Government Machinery by 40.3% and Interior Ministry by 317.7%. This demonstrates a whopping lack of fiscal discipline in the public sector.
- During the conduct of the 2019 Audit, the Auditor General noted that the government assured them that the overruns would be addressed. However, the situation continued in 2020. Under paragraph 8 of the 2020 Auditor General’s Report, under the title ‘Budget overrun’, the Auditor General wrote, “Our review of actual expenditure against budget showed that 18 MDAs and 215 MMDAs exceeded their approved budget for goods and services, other expenditure, compensation of employees and capital expenditures by GH¢8,827,394,033 during the 2020 financial year.
Given the above, which constitute just a tip of the iceberg when it comes to financial irregularities in the public sector, supervised by the Minister of Finance, we at the Daily Searchlight believe that the Ministry of Finance and the government should not be allowed to impose any additional hardship on the people of Ghana by way of more taxes, until they are able to give clear assurances to the people that they are not habitually fetching our water with leaking baskets.
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