The Vice-President, Mr John Dramani Mahama, has commended the Ghana Audit Service for the role it has played in promoting accountability and transparency in government and among public financial managers. He said by providing oversight functions of evaluating the government's performance and asking questions of its activities, the Audit Service had helped to manage risks and improve corporate governance. Mr Dramani said that in a speech read on his behalf by the Minister of Works and Housing, Mr Alban Bagbin, at a dinner and awards night of the Audit Service as part of its centenary celebrations held on the theme: “A Century of Public Sector Auditing - Defining New Frontiers." The night was graced by past auditors general and retired workers of the service. Mr Mahama said the foresight of the public auditor had resulted in many worthwhile recommendations. "We have a lot of respect for members of the Audit Service because they saw to the operations of the government and public organisations and worked out ways to make them more efficient or effective as well as make recommendations to improve the operations of the public sector,” he said. He noted that although the auditor's work was in the past regarded as witch-hunting, the task of auditing was a management tool that ensured the efficient and of resources to achieve stated objectives. Mr Mahama said good governance was synonymous with accountability, which was used in relation to stewardship and governance, adding that "we certainly cannot live without accountability." He charged the service to play a significant role in the management and reporting of oil and gas revenues and expenditures to ensure transparency and accountability in the exploitation of such coveted resources. He called on the country's social partners to collaborate with the service to provide and build the needed capacities and competencies of the service. While admitting that the country had insufficient revenue to deal with the government's development programmes intended to improve the socioeconomic infrastructure of the nation and alleviate poverty, Mr Mahama pledged the government's support for the service by providing the necessary resources it needed to enable it to continue to render standard services for the nation. Awards were given to past auditors general ill appreciation of their immense services to the organisation and those who had worked for the service for more than 30 years. The Auditor General, Mr Richard Quartey, said the auditor's job was significant to the promotion of accountability and charged the workers to maximise their efforts to ensure that the service was productive in its service delivery. He noted that as part of measures to improve individual productivity, the service had put in place a new appraisal form which would be used to assess workers' actual performances against personal work plans and targets. "We have also assigned a Resource Management System as a tool to capture your time and other inputs which become the output of your performance of assigned tasks and measure this against time spent to determine whether your time and other inputs which become the output of your effort can be assessed as having added value to institutional goals and eventual productivity, " he noted. Mr Quartey further urged the workers to work at meeting stakeholders expectations when they made demands for good pay and better conditions of service. Source: Daily Graphic