The Director of Operation at the Ghana Internal Audit Agency (IAA), Mr. Nathan Yankey has revealed that some internal auditors are poisoned and killed for doing their jobs effectively.
He recounted that an officer of the agency had his food poisoned and got him killed immediately after eating because he was ensuring that the public funds were protected.
“Corruption will fight whoever fights corruption hence, people who risk their lives to fight corruption must be provided with security both personal and job security. Sometimes they have to think of what will happen to them when they bring out issues to the extent that sometimes people are poisoned to the extent of even losing their lives,” he told Alfred Ocansey on the Sunrise show on 3FM Thursday August 11.
According to Mr. Yankey, the Internal Audit Agency is compelled to work with a staff strength of 61 instead of 120 due to lack of permanent office accommodation and adequate funds. “We lack funds and depend on donor agencies for funding” Yankey mentioned.
“We hope that ones we get the necessary support we need, we will be able to safeguard the public purse by putting in all stop gap measures in place to work efficiently” he stated
The Ghana Internal Audit Agency retrieved over 380 million cedis in 2021 and over 600 million within the first and second quarters of 2022 as more efforts are being made to ensure that state funds are not abused.
He explained that if we can work on streamlining and getting public officials to comply with public sector financial management systems it will help prevent a lot of financial irregularities because it is expensive to allow the things to happen before we go after the culprits as in the case of external audit reports which takes a year or more and always in arrears for the state to spend.
“If we are looking at how we can work quickly in real time to be able to prevent this from happening, then that’s where the internal audit function comes in” Nathan Yankey iterated.