The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has questioned the Central Regional Coordinating Council over payment vouchers totalling GH¢14.88 million that were processed outside the Ghana Integrated Financial Management Information System (GIFMIS).

The Committee has warned the council that if the same breach is identified in a subsequent audit, it will regard it as evidence that the institution failed to implement the corrective measures it said it had introduced.

The issue came up at the Committee’s sitting on Tuesday, October 6, 2026, when it considered the Auditor-General’s 2025 report on Ministries, Departments and other Agencies.

According to the audit finding presented to the Committee, the Central Regional Coordinating Council failed to process payment vouchers totalling GH¢14,882,540.98 through GIFMIS.

A representative of the Ministry of Local Government, Chieftaincy and Religious Affairs told the Committee that the transactions involved donor funds and were subsequently captured through journal vouchers.

He said subsequent transactions had been processed through GIFMIS after the audit observation was raised.

The explanation prompted further questions from the Committee about why the transactions had initially been processed outside the system.

A Committee member questioned whether the fact that the funds were donor-funded justified their exclusion from GIFMIS, stressing that donor funds were still public funds.

The representative later explained that the funds formed part of the approved budget and that the donor components had been captured during the budget process.

He said the problem arose because, when the releases were made, there was an issue with the budget code required to process the transactions through GIFMIS.

According to him, journal vouchers were subsequently raised to capture the transactions on the system and ensure that the accounts accurately reflected the expenditure.

The Committee continued to question the representative over the reasons the transactions had not initially been processed through GIFMIS.

The Chairperson of the Committee, Abena Osei-Asare, said the concern was not only about the transactions already identified but also whether the system had since been corrected.

She warned that if the same problem appeared in a future audit, the Committee would regard it as evidence that the institution had failed to implement the corrective system it claimed to have introduced.

“If we find this, then clearly we will know that you failed to learn or you failed to implement the system that you are telling us you have implemented,” she said.

The warning followed the Chairperson’s position at the opening of the 2025 audit hearings that institutions must show what had changed after previous audit findings instead of repeatedly appearing before the Committee with explanations for the same weaknesses.

She said the Committee would distinguish between administrative infractions and actual financial losses, while requiring institutions to show whether audit recommendations had been implemented and weak systems corrected.

The representative of the Central Regional Coordinating Council maintained that subsequent transactions had been processed through GIFMIS and that journal vouchers had been used to capture the earlier transactions that had not gone through the system.