59 MMDA'S TO FACE SANCTIONS — DAPAAH (PAGE 12, AUGUST 28, 2010)

FIFTY-NINE out of the 138 district, municipal and metropolitan assemblies that failed to submit their reports covering the period 2001 to 2004 are likely to face sanctions.
The assemblies might lose future allocations of public funds to them and also face the law.
The Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee(PAC), Mr Albert Kan Dapaah, made this known in Tamale during the opening of a two-day public sitting of the PAC to hear reports of 21 district, municipal and metropolitan assemblies in the three northern regions, covering the period 2001 to 2005.
He further announced that the Auditor General’s report covering 2001 to 2004 identified such anomalies as disregard for laid down procedures, misuse of revenue, contract irregularities, failure to recover loans, procurement problems, overpayment and embezzlement issues.
He said the report detected that those anomalies led to the loss in revenue of 58 billion old Ghana cedis or (5.8 million new Ghana cedis).
Mr Dapaah observed that the hosting of the public sitting in Tamale “is historic because it is the first time the PAC is conducting its public sitting in the metropolis”.
He explained that the idea was to have the PAC’s public sittings close to the rural communities where the various metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies were located.
“Governments everywhere are enjoined to render account to the public regarding spending of public funds which are the tax- payer’s money” he pointed out.
He further stated that the failure of the government to render proper account could make the country’s citizens lose confidence in her resulting in confusion.
The chairman stated that although the current DCEs appearing before the PAC were not there at the time most of the transactions took place, they were required to be in a position to explain to the committee how the funds were spent.
The Head of Public Affairs in Parliament, Mr Jones Kugblenu, explained that “59 assemblies failed to answer their respective queries and as a result risk forfeiting any form of funding from government in the future”.
He observed that most of the assemblies rather spent so much on administrative purposes while others had their Internally Generated Funds (IGF) “sitting in the banks without utilising them for development purposes”.
The Northern Regional Minister, Mr Moses Mabengba, has meanwhile urged the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) to expand its public sittings to include all the 20 metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies in the region.
He noted that the current situation where only 21 district assemblies in the three northern regions appeared before it was not the best.