By S. Siapha Mulbah
The Government’s Internal Audit Agency (IAA) is set to release its first public sector compliance scorecard on line ministries and agencies performances to the head of the institutions.
The compliance scorecard is to be released at a two-day round table dialogue from next Wednesday, July 12- to Thursday, July 13, 2023 to give heads of public institutions some hints on gains made in government for the time under review and identify problems that could be solved in the future.
Speaking at the Ministry of Information regular press briefing yesterday, IAA Director General, David Kemah, disclosed that the round table conference is intended to review the performance of government ministries and agencies in line with the compliance of financial and governance laws.
Kemah explained that said compliance in the sector promotes efficiency and productivity in service delivery across the institutions, a method he thought would be expedient for national growth.
According to him, the round table is an excellent platform on which to put out information on how the internal audit functions will be approached, going forward.
It is necessary, he said, to have the people informed of what the entity is going to be looking for as issues of concentration for auditing functions.
The IAA boss added that the event will have group ministries, agencies, commissions, and SOEs in two or three sectors that will all be represented, to have the discussion and subsequently report its outcome to the presidency for further actions.
He maintained that the scores obtained by the government entities through the compliance scorecard will not be released to the public until the head of cabinet, President George Manneh Weah, being the highest authority, decides to request its publication.
Director Kemah also said that the process of auditing the public sector and introducing a scorecard is not intended to name and shame government institutions, but to promote efficiency and mitigate malpractices by correcting the wrongs in the system.
“The reason we are giving the scorecard is to provide a pictorial image of what different ministries have been doing based on our own assessment about controlled activities, compliance with different laws and overall operations. So we will provide the score to heads of entities and give them the opportunity to review them and give the methodology used to arrive at the numbers we have,” he said.
He encouraged the heads of institutions that will be part of the process to not see the scores released as a problem to the functions in the public sector but as a tool that could be used to improve working relations and performances, going forward.
The public sector compliance scorecard was launched in February of this year at the Ministerial Complex, to be implemented through the use of the Pentana Audit Software procured by the World Bank to transform internal auditing in government. It is used to transition from the manual method to an automated, digitized, cloud-based and modern software, according to the Internal Audit Agency.
