By Mabinty M. Kamara
An audit scorecard published by a coalition of civil society and donor groups has revealed that between 2014 and 2017 a total of Le 221, 545,652 was unaccounted for by the Ministries of agriculture, health and education as well as the National Revenue Authority (NRA).
The coalition known as the Public Finance Monitoring Consortium is made up of Budget Advocacy Network (BAN), Christian Aid, Center for Accountability and the Rule of Law, Restless Development and UK Aid.
The report is based on “a careful study” of the annual Audit report over the four years under review.
According to the breakdown of the figures in the report, Le 198,570,974,108 was unaccounted for by NRA over the period under review, while Le 9,257.207,996 was unaccounted for at the Ministry of Agriculture.
Le 13,276,877,385 unrecovered in the Ministry of Education while and Le 25,722,790,845 was never accounted for by the Ministry of Health and Sanitation.
The report was launched on Wednesday at BAN’s office in Freetown and comes on the backdrop of a fresh audit report for 2018 which was released late last year.
The House of Parliament is yet to discuss the report as required by law. But the Anti-Corruption Commission announced early this year that there were a number of issues they were investigating.
Euan Davidson, team leader of the consortium praised Audit Service Sierra Leone for their “thoroughness and credibility”. He said there had been challenges with following up on the recommendations.
Davidson said this new report had been simplified by the addition of a lot of imageries. The outcome of the reports was compressed into a maximum of 10 pages, with each book highlighting key issues on a specific institution.
“The problem is when those audit reports come up, they show lots of problems, lots of recommendations in the audit report but at the end of the day, nothing happens, no proper follow up. Every year, the Auditor General makes the same recommendations, in 2017 and 2018.
He added, “The document is maybe 300 pages or more, which makes it difficult for people to have time to read and understand. What we have done is to produce these very short reports with lots of images to make it easier to understand and show the amount of money that went missing.”
“If you take for example the ministry of health, in the four years from 2014 to 2017, 25 billion Leones was unrecovered and if you were to recover that money, that would pay for 863 health workers. So audit reports are not just boring financial documents they actually impact on service delivery, impact on people’s life.”
Davidson further explained how the recovery of these monies could help government in the future.
“If you look at the educational sector, our report finds over 13 billion Leone unaccounted for and that will pay for almost 90% of all learning materials for 2020. So, if the government wants to hit its target in education, he should follow up on this to ensure that it is recovered,” he explained.
Executive Director of BAN, Abdul Melron Sesay called on government, media and civil society groups to pursue the recovery of those funds.
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