CAG to sanction institutions ....

... that disregard Financial Administration Act
Accra, March 9, GNA - The Controller and Accountant General (CAG), Mr Christian Sottie on Thursday said his Office would in future not hesitate to withhold funds to institutions that disregarded the rules and authority under the Financial Administration Act (FAA) 2003. He said the Act had given the CAG the responsibility for the custody of public funds, accounting for them and issuing out instructions to all who managed public funds.

"Yet some institutions have disregarded the role of the Controller and have gone ahead to appoint their own accounting staff without recourse to the Controller, who is responsible for appointing and taking custody of public funds," he said.

Mr Sottie was speaking at a two-day workshop organized for Treasury Officers and Heads of Accounting units from Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) to introduce them to the re-engineered disbursement procedures under the re-aligned treasury system.

The new system would ensure that treasuries become integral part of MDAs and Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies to enable the current disbursement process to be shortened, since the MDAs have direct control over staff.

The Controller said some institutions had not been accounting fully for internally generated funds, saying they used these funds without approval of the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning and urged the participants to educate and advise such officials about the consequences of their actions.

Mr Sottie said the CAGD would speed up the payments system because it had realized that unnecessary delays in payment had contributed to complaints from the public that they were not having money in their pockets.

He said although the Government was making strenuous efforts to improve the economy and the indicators showed improvement, people still claimed they were not feeling the improvement in their pockets. "You are in the frontline of the Public Financial Sector where the majority of the payments are made to all other sectors. Whenever there are delays in these areas, they reverberate through the whole economy," he told the participants. 09 March 06