The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) is calling for the establishment of a multi-party parliamentary Budget office to check over spending by government.

Addressing journalists on the 2014 budget, Senior Economists with the IEA, Dr John Kwakye expressed worry at the manner in which Ghana’s budget deficit rose from 4.8 percent in November 2011 to 11.8 percent by December 2012.

"Setting up an independent multi-party Parliamentary budget office will probably be the best way to do this.

"For example, it is unconscionable that in 2012, a budget deficit of 4.8%, which was announced in November the previous year in the budget presentation and which became 6.7% in the supplementary budget of July 2012, eventually ballooned to 11.8% in December 2012", Dr. Kwakye noted.

He therefore pointed out the need for government's attention to be drawn to what he called the "weak oversight of government's spending by Parliament" and called for anomaly to be rectified as soon as possible.

The Senior Economist with the IEA was further of the view that Parliament be blamed for the excesses since nobody was held responsible for the failures.

"Nobody was sanctioned for this excess. In fact the blame should be place squarely at the door step of Parliament", Dr. Kwakye asserted.

The IEA also disagreed with government’s plans to increase the Value Added Tax (VAT).

"We welcome the infrastructure fund given the urgency to increase capital spending. However, while we agree that it should be sufficiently funded, as we have stated above, we do not agree with increasing the VAT rate to do that", Dr. Kwakye indicated.

This, he reiterated, will lead to high spending on interest payments than expending on capital, and called for a "fundamental rebalancing of the budget by reducing recurrent expenditure to create room for capital spending".