By Benjamin A. Commey
Accra, July 23, GNA – The Audit Service has urged the public to continue reporting issues of mismanagement and other irregularities within the society to the Auditor-General.
Mrs Roberta Ntim, Director, Performance Audit Unit of the Ghana Audit Service, who made the call, said that would enable the Service to ensure judicious use of the State’s resources.
“We want you to know that the Auditor-General is interested in dealing with issues that the citizens are interested in especially,” she said.
“Report issues to the Auditor-General’s office because if you keep quiet on them, it will hurt a larger number of people. If more people are reporting about road issues or uncompleted housing projects or infrastructure projects for instance, people are reporting about our equipment in hospitals are not enough or not functioning, if these things are picked up during our yearly audit, in our planning we incorporate them and the audits are carried out,” Mrs Ntim stressed.
She said this when the Service sensitised stakeholders on Tuesday on its CitizensEye Mobile Application, which was launched in 2019 to enable the public to directly report corrupt cases to the Auditor-General.
The purpose of the workshop was to revamp citizens’ interest in reporting irregularities to the Auditor-General through the app.
It was attended by officials from the Ministries, Departments and Agencies.
The CitizenEye was developed in collaboration with the German Development Corporation (GIZ) to empower citizens to be able to provide feedback to the Auditor-General on the implementation of government policies, report issues and share information on suspected cases of mismanagement, fraud, abuse, wastage, and other irregularities in public offices and institutions.
Mrs Ntim said the app, since its launch about five years ago, had enabled the Service to plan and prioritise its audit for preceding years.
She said the Service had received various complaints from the public through the app over the past five years, some of which had led to a “number of audits being carried out.”
Majority of the reports, she said, were on infrastructure, adding that most of the reports were received from the Ashanti and the Greater Accra regions.
While bemoaning the decline in citizen’s reports, in the past two years, Mrs Ntim assured whistleblowers of protection of their identity when they made such reports.
“The application basically makes you anonymous,” she said.
“You can report an issue and there is an identification whether you will be able to say who is reporting, as in disclose your identity or not. And then also, we have only two persons that are at the back end of our data who man the information that comes to the back end.
“So, as for identity, we do not disclose identities as far as the information that comes in is concerned,” she assured.
Mr Jude Danbo, a Technical officer, Ghana Audit Service, said the Service was exploring ways to improve the app to strengthen its security features as well as make it more user-friendly.
One such improvement, he said, was adding an audio feature that would allow users to report issues through voice notes in the local language.
“We are looking at improving feedback mechanism, we want people to be able to trace issues from when they are reported to when they are resolved…”
“Also, we are making it easier for people to select. Instead of using the pin around to pick where the issues are coming from, we are looking at making it possible for people to type the name of the location and then it pops up to the exact location on the google map,” Mr Danbo said.
GNA