Parliament urged to expedite passage of Audit Service Bill

Director-General of the Internal Audit Agency, Dr. Oduro Osae, has urged Parliament to expedite the passing of the new Internal Audit Service Bill into an Act to resource, employ more staff and empower them to effectively and efficiently prosecute culprits.

“I think it is long overdue because if we really want to fight corruption head-on, we have to give institutions that investigate these issues prosecutorial powers so that prosecution can be done in real-time,” he noted.

Dr. Osae explained that giving it to another institution that had its own prosecutorial protocols would slow the processes and institutions that did the investigation and had the evidence were in a better position to effectively, efficiently, and expeditiously prosecute cases they had worked on.

According to him, such processes would avoid administrative bureaucracies from going through another agency because the Internal Audit Agency was on the quest of ensuring that public sector employees worked for their salaries thus mapping salaries to worker performance.

Dr. Osae expressed worry over the inability of some heads of public institutions to ensure quality assurance hence the need for signing a Memorandum of Understanding with the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission to ensure that the government paid fair wages and salaries to workers, whereas they also increased productivity.

“The agency is keen on ensuring that public workers do not shortchange the government hence its collaboration with the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission to put in place a very good performance monitoring system to ensure that salaries and wages are tied to productivity.

“The government’s compensation budget is very high and that is affecting its revenue so that is why the Internal Audit Service wants to ensure fiscal discipline by pushing everybody to operate within an approved budget including everybody on the government payroll,” Dr. Osae indicated.