Parliament today began debating the 2016 financial statement in spite of a stiff opposition from the Minority who are suspicious the Finance Ministry is smuggling in figures and fresh items for approval.

Finance Minister Seth Terkper last week presented the 2016 Budget to the House. This week the house was expected to spend the next two weeks to debate and approve the itemised statement.

But the debate got off to a controversial start Thursday, having been delayed for a day. The house failed to form a quorum yesterday.

Members from the Minority appear confused and unclear about which statement the debate should be centered on after three documents emerged for consideration.

The Deputy Finance Minister Cassiel Ato Forson argued that there was a printer error, when some figures were transposed by the printer during printing of the document to be presented to the house.

But the Minority would not buy that explanation.

The Minority NPP is flagging the new document because they suspect government has inserted new figures that are not in the original document presented to parliament by the Finance Mminister.

Yesterday, even before the house adjourned for lack of quorum, the matter was first raised by the Minority. Ato Forson conceded the pages were mixed during the printout, but insisted that what the minister presented to the house has not changed.

A reference was made to omission of figures under the Annual Budget Funding Amount. Answering that, Mr. Forson said those details were provided in page 212 of the budget statement.

Since the errors, in his view, were “a matter of technical issue” the house can stick to the original statement presented by the Finance Minister.

He added that the concerns of the Minority have been “well noted and would be addressed in the course of the debate”.

However, the Minority’s fear is grounded in the fact that the original statement was captured in the parliamentary hansard. It is therefore proper for the Finance Minister to come back to parliament to rectify the errors, Deputy Minority Leader Dominic Nitiwul posited.

Professor Gyan Baffuor pointed out that an amount of about 605 million that was supposed to have been allocated to the Ghana Revenue Authority was given to the Local Government Ministry. The Local Government was supposed to get about 226 million.

These errors cannot be overlooked, the Minority strongly argued.

A member of the Finance Committee of Parliament, Dr. Mark Assibey Yeboah arguing in support of the Minority told Evans Mensah on Joy FM’s Top Story that most of his colleagues “didn’t know which document the debate should be centred on”.

But after the leadership of the house had met the Speaker, the debate started.

He chose to stick to the first one presented to the house, stating that he cannot reduce the errors to typos as explained by Mr. Ato Forson.