Political and Economic Risk Analyst, Dr. Theo Acheampong, says the government’s failure to keep an eagle’s focus on the tax irregularities and the cash is what has contributed to the ballooning financial recklessness in the ministries.

According to him, when government’s vigilance on tax irregularities and cash wanes, financial recklessness balloons; resulting in the about 13.4 billion cedis being lost between 2015 and 2020 to irregularities.

Speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express, he said “Well you’d have to go back to the political economy and how things work, especially if you look at the data, 2017. New government comes in, they want to clean up the system, try to get things done, so normally what you tend to see is that there is a bit more of an eagle eye, let me put it that way, in terms of the finances, then in between we lose our guard a little bit and then subsequently we see those irregularities begin to creep up again in that regard.”

He added that “And for me the thing really then was perhaps a bit interesting in all of this exercise is that when you isolate the 7 lines of irregularities of the Auditor General’s report; because you remember this work is based on the AG’s report and accumulating it over 6 years what is quite clear is that we need to have an eagle’s focus on the tax irregularities and an eagle focus on the cash.”

Dr. Theo Acheampong further fingered the approval of so many tax exemptions as a driving force of financial recklessness in government.

He called for the passing into law of the tax exemptions bill hoping that it would bring some proper structure to the system.

“But the tax particularly because we’ve been given far too many of these, sometimes, given exemptions away that the people are not qualified to be getting largely because of the way sometimes the system tends to work.

“So you need to harmonise it and that’s why I think I’d call on Parliament, honourable, the committee, to as soon as possible pass the tax exemptions bill. That would really go a long way to streamline a lot of some of these irregularities that we’re seeing. That I think will be a very good starting point,” he said.

The Chairman of the Finance Committee of Parliament, Kwaku Kwarteng, who was also on the show announced that the tax exemptions bill will be passed in the month of June.

“Our committee has already completed the meetings and engagement on that. We will lay it on the floor sometime next week. And within two weeks I think we should be able to pass it into law,” he said.