Corruption fight: I’m willing to die – Auditor-General

The Auditor-General Daniel Domelevo says his desire to fight corruption has been heightened by the abject poverty he had witnessed across the country in one of his recent travels.

“…Anytime I travel outside Accra my resolve to fight corruption becomes higher because I can see the poverty everywhere, it is not acceptable,” he stated Monday at the launch of the payroll verification process for government workers at Elmina in the Central Region.

“You look at schools and you say, is that to be called school? You see police offices and you will say is that a police office? Are they living in the prison or police office? You look at everything and say what is wrong with this country? In the midst of plenty we are living in abject poverty because a few people greedily take everything for themselves and they don’t care about us,” bemoaned Mr. Domelevo before pledging to ruthlessly fight the canker.

Mr. Domelevo who last year, surcharged some four public officials for allegedly causing financial loss to the state in fulfilment of an order by the Supreme Court did not mince words when he stated at the launch “we owe it a duty to ourselves to stand up and fight against this [corruption]. That is why I am fighting and I’ll be a very happy man if I die doing the right thing so I don’t fear.”

Payroll verification will cut corruption in public sector by 55%

Touching on the payroll verification platform, Mr. Domelevo said it would help in expunging ghost names from the public payroll.

That notwithstanding, he also called on Ghanaians to help the department by providing with information on ‘ghost names’ on the government’s payroll for onward identification and deletion.

Explaining how the ‘ghost names’ conundrum does not only milk the public purse dry but also affects the country’s ability to employ the teeming unemployed graduates scattered across the country, Mr. Domelevo without any shred of equivocation said “…that is why we think we should wage our war into payroll being a major consumer of the resources.”

Three billion dollars lost every year due to corruption

Ghana is said to be losing more than $3billion every year through corruption.

The amount is said to be about 300 per cent of all the aid it receives in the same period, according to a study by IMANI Africa which looked at procurement losses in the reports of the Auditor General between 2012 and 2014 and compared it to the aid received.

The loss of money through corruption is usually in the area of public procurement, with public officials inflating contract prices for the provision of goods and services.