By Bill W. Cooper
The Internal Audit Agency (IAA) will on December 15, begin auditing all government line ministries and agencies including embassies in and out of the country and this exercise is expected to last for 90 days.
This year audit will be consistent with Part 6 Sub-section 6.1 a(i) of the 2013 Act establishing the Internal Audit Agency which grants IAA the authority to establish internal audit functions and/or bring under its mandate existing audit functions which shall constitute a part of the public sector entity concerned.
Making the disclosure yesterday at his IAA office in Congo Town, the acting Director General, Clarence W. Williams, said that the audit will be fully carryout by the National Payroll Cleanup Taskforce constituted by President George Weah with the objective of removing ghost names from national wage bill.
Mr. Williams explained that their target for this year’s audit cuts across all government entities to ensure that employees who are working two places and are receiving salary for those areas are removed from the payroll and are made to restitute the money they received over the years.
According to him, though the IAA have done a lot of audits within some government institutions where they manage to remove ghost names from said institutions’ payrolls; he intoned that they are very optimistic that this year’s audit will secure millions of dollars for government.
He name the Liberia National Police (LNP), the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and the Liberia Drugs Enforcement Agency (LDEA) among others as some of the audits done in the past; emphasizing that the audit will save government twice the amount secured from previous audits in the past.
The IAA boss further indicated that though this year’s audit was push to December due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the country, he stated that they will be going all out in the field with the National Identification Registry (NIR), the Ministry of Finance and the Civil Servant Agency (CSA) to ensure that those who will be identified as being on government payroll illegally do not have the opportunity to get back.
Meanwhile, Mr. Williams further revealed that they might likely spend over US$800,000 for the audit, and stated that the government has given an initial contribution to jumpstart the work but that the government is unable to finance the entire process and has written international partners for support.
He however reaffirmed that the IAA commitment is to effectively and efficiently coordinate, supervise, control and monitor internal audits across the country aimed at increasing compliance and helping the system to do the right thing in the right way, averring, “We are also hopeful that the said resident internal auditors will officially transition to the IAA’s payroll in December of this year.”