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The Western Regional Minister, Mr Evans Paul Aidoo, has called for a review of the current system where District Co-ordinating Directors (DCDs), District Finance Officers (DFOs) and Budget Officers in the various Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) are the spending officers, signing cheques of the assemblies and leaving out the Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executives (MMDCEs).

That system, Mr Aidoo contended, was the bane of several reported massive corruption, misappropriation and misapplication of public funds, including royalties and the common fund in the assemblies which are meant for development for the masses.

In effect, he noted that some MMDCEs have been, in certain instances, incriminated and accused of having condoned and connived for such deals and are heavily criticised by the people for embezzling their money meant for development projects and consequently call for their blood or dismissal by the President.

Mr Aidoo cited an example in the region, where a DCD and a DFO have been interdicted for embezzling huge sums of royalties belonging to some assemblies.

NACAP

The regional minister, who made the call in his closing remarks at a day’s dialogue by the National Anti-Corruption Plan (NACAP) with members of the Western Regional Co-ordinating Council (RCC) in Sekondi yesterday, explained that ideally, any payments by the DCD and the DFO ought to be authorised and approved by the DCE before they could go ahead to sign cheques as required by the regulations.

Following the adoption of NACAP by Parliament on July 3, 2014, the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), the lead implementing agency, with support from the office of the President and other development programme partners, has been organising various programmes to facilitate the process.

The theme for the 10-year programme is, ‘‘NACAP: Ghana United Against Corruption’’. The Acting Commissioner of CHRAJ, Mr Richard Quayson; the Director, Mr Charles Ayamdoo, and the Governance Advisor, Office of the President, Mr Daniel Batidam, are facilitating the programme nationwide.

Undue advantage

However, Mr Aidoo pointed out that on some occasions, many payments were made by those spending officers without the authorisation of the MMDCEs who were usually saddled with a lot of payment vouchers to go through, saying that the DCDs and DFOs, therefore, took undue advantage to cash money and went ahead to pay individuals and institutions without regard for the rules.

He insisted that some of the vouchers prepared by the account officers were not even seen by the MMDCEs let alone thoroughly examine them for payment by the spending officers.

The regional minister maintained that in certain cases, some of them did not even have the time to go through reports and just left everything to the officers to do their own thing.

Decentralisation practice

‘But at the end of the day, the government appointee as the head of the district should be blamed for the mishap, leaving the civil and public servants to go scot-free in many instances. I’m, therefore, calling for a review of the current arrangement to be a little responsive to the decentralisation practice or else it will continue to breed more corruption in the system,’’ Mr Aidoo maintained.

Mr Aidoo also observed that the auditing system in the MMDAs was not good enough, where internal auditors after doing their work and presenting them to the presiding members did not call for any discussion to fine-tune the report.

‘‘That is why there are speculations all over the place and so the system must be transparent such that, everybody should know his or her role and the people we are serving will also have confidence in us and the entire system,’’ he stressed.