The Chairman of Parliament’s Finance Committee, Kwaku Kwarteng, says the Auditor General needs to begin surcharging and prosecuting persons who engage in financial recklessness within the government.

According to an IMANI report on financial recklessness, it was discovered that about 13.4 billion cedis was lost to financial recklessness between 2015 and 2020 alone, with the Finance Ministry accounting for almost 90% of all financial recklessness cases.

Reacting to the report, Kwaki Kwarteng said with the Auditor General cracking the whip, financial recklessness and irregularities within the government will reduce drastically.

He said, “I think the Auditor General should be the man holding the whip and to say now even if it was out of negligence or it was unintended, a revolution can sometimes consume a few of its own children, let us punish people.”

He further called on other state institutions including the police and the courts to attach a sense of urgency to issues of corruption and financial recklessness in order to drive home a message of how serious the government was in reducing it.

“Let the Auditor General begin to surcharge and hopefully let the public institutions, the police and the courts come to understand that revenue for instance is half the economy, and it is the only way we’re going to get this country to prosper and therefore the state entities, the police, the courts should come together with some common resolve that going forward the revenue and the finance issues we’ll treat them differently.

“Hopefully that sense of urgency would change the culture, and then we can hope that as we move on we will see improvement. Otherwise there’ll be yearly fluctuations, you’ll always look back and say we are just where we are,” he stated.