Mr Carl Lokko, a Procurement Consultant, on Tuesday said the Procurement Act represented the biggest challenge ever for Ghana to lessen procurement fraud. He said the inbuilt checks in the process; sensitisation of the public and training of stakeholders should be able to make underhand dealings less and less possible. Mr Lokko, who works for the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), was talking to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) during one of the series of short courses for officers with procurement related functions from the district assemblies and public agencies in the Volta Region. They included District Coordinating Directors, Budget Officers, accountants and members of tender boards. Mr Lokko said stakeholders were taking a second look at some sections of the law with the view to revising them for more efficiency. Mr Evans Kanfra, a Director at the Regional Economic Planning Office, said by the time the series of training workshops ended in February 2008, 1,900 officers from public sector institutions in the region would have been trained. Mr Sebastian Jerry Ackotia, Director, Policy and Strategy at the Public Procurement Authority, said running alongside the implementation of the law is measured efforts to build a respectable, knowledgeable and competent core of public sector purchasing officers through short, medium and long term courses. He said apart from procurement practitioners, staff of institutions such as the police, Serious Fraud Office, legislators, Attorney General's Department and Audit Service among others who perform oversight duties in purchasing would benefit from modules of courses relevant to their roles. Mr Reuben Amegashitsi, Regional Economic Planning Officer, lauded gains made under the law, saying the training programmes "will lay the foundation stone to drive efficiency and effectiveness in the Public Procurement System in Ghana". He reminded course participants of the high rating accorded Ghana's public procurement system by the World Bank in a report about three months ago and said "we cannot afford to regress on the success chalked". Source: GNA