2016 Budget: Huge contingency allocations opaque – GII

The Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII) has questioned government’s motive in listing huge sums of money as contingency funds in the 2016 budget statement presented to Parliament last Friday.

Send Ghana, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) raised the alarm on November 18, 2015 after discovering that several departments and agencies have been allocated huge sums for unplanned expenditure.

The health sector, for instance, received more than a billion Ghana cedis under such terms.

Executive Secretary of the GII Mr Vitus Azeem says that “you cannot just include contingency and put a huge sum of money in it”.

He told Class 91.3 FM’s Naa Deede Tettey in an interview that: “Miscellaneous expenses are usually things that are very minute that people may not question. But, if it’s a big amount of money, then there is a cause to put it to question”.

The anti-corruption campaigner proposes detailed information on expenditure in the budget to enable parliamentarians to take the right decisions before approval.

He believes by doing so, expenditure can properly be accounted for, and the tendency for people to spend money which will not be well captured, reduced.

“The budget proposal is sent to parliament for approval and you expect parliament to ask all the necessary questions. They can only ask the relevant questions if they are given all the necessary detailed information about the budget.”

“If you do aggregated figures for expenses and they are not listed and you approve it, then it means the agency involved can just go ahead and do anything and you cannot call them to question,” he cautioned.