At the end of the previous month, the Auditor-General’s special account at the Bank of Ghana (BoG) had accumulated more than GH¢11.52 million in disallowed unearned salaries and allowances.
The Consolidated Fund has received GH¢10 million from the “Auditor-General’s Recoveries Account,” which was established in June of last year.
The funds are a portion of the expenditure disallowances related to unearned salaries and other recoveries that were reported to Parliament through various Auditors-General reports.
The specialised account was created specifically to protect the public purse by tracking in real-time the progress of recoveries made through expenditure disallowances, according to the Auditor-General, Johnson Akuamoah Asiedu, who revealed this to the Daily Graphic in an exclusive interview in Accra.
He clarified that the central bank account was also opened primarily to receive the recovered unearned salaries and allowances.
“The specialised account we set up to receive unearned salaries and other recoveries has yielded GH¢11.52 million in just a year.
Consequently, GH¢10 million has been transferred from the account into the Consolidated Fund,” he said.
The context
Up until June of last year, the Controller and Accountant-General‘s Suspense Account (CAGSA) was always the recipient of the Auditor-General’s recommendations for recovering unearned salaries.
However, because the CAGSA was unable to provide real-time information on those recoveries, efforts to enforce the laws against surcharging and disallowances appear to be having less success.
“It is in the light of this that the Auditor-General’s Recoveries Account was opened to track and report on recoveries made in implementing audit recommendations with regard to unearned salaries and allowances,” the Auditor General said.
