The Director of Audit at the Ghana Audit Service, Hannah Mensah, told journalists to look beyond the amount of public money spent when reviewing government projects. Speaking at a media training in Accra on Monday, September 28, she said accounting for funds alone does not prove that the resources delivered the intended results.
Ms Mensah used a hypothetical example: a government institution spends 100 million cedis on a project and can account for every cedi. That does not mean the project met its goals. “Spending is different and the project deliverables are also different,” she said. “So, it doesn’t necessarily mean that if I spend 100 million and I’m able to account for it, everyone’s needs have been met.”
Her remarks came during a session on the Auditor-General’s Performance Audit Report on the National Petroleum Authority (NPA). She explained that performance auditing focuses on how well resources are converted into expected outcomes. It examines not just the money spent, but the systems, processes, and activities that turn resources into results.
Ms Mensah said performance audits follow principles of economy, efficiency, and effectiveness. These help auditors check if resources were bought and used properly, if they achieved their goals, and if the most was made of them.
She described performance as an input-output process. Financial, human, and material resources serve as inputs. These inputs pass through activities to produce outputs, which then lead to outcomes.
Using the example of staff recruitment, Ms Mensah said auditors would ask whether personnel were hired at the right cost, with the right skills, at the right time, and in the right numbers.
“Have you recruited them with regards to the appropriate cost, the right cost, as in how much we are paying them?” she asked. “The quality of the staff, do they have the expertise to do that activity? Did we get them at the right time?”
She warned against confusing completing an activity with achieving an outcome. For instance, monitoring filling stations is an output. Auditors must still ask whether the monitoring met its purpose.
“What was the objective of asking these staff, these resources to go and carry out that monitoring activity?” she said.
Ms Mensah urged journalists to apply this approach when reading the NPA audit report. She said they should avoid focusing only on spending figures or activities recorded.
She also advised caution in calling audit observations “findings.” An observation is a starting point for deeper investigation. Simply reporting differences between expected and actual figures does not make a full finding.
Auditors must study why the gap exists, she said. “This observation needs to be further assessed in finding out why is this so.”
Journalists should avoid drawing conclusions from an observation without understanding the context. “We don’t only base our conclusions on what is supposed to be the case, it’s just an observation which needs to be scrutinised,” Ms Mensah said.
She described this process as root cause analysis. “Because a lot of things go into it. So we do what we call a root cause analysis.”
Ms Mensah encouraged journalists to take a broad view of audit reports and consider all aspects before forming conclusions. “If you look at our reports in this holistic view, you take into consideration all of the aspects,” she said.
The media training was organised by the Ghana Anti-Corruption Coalition (GACC) with the Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP) and Transparency International-Ghana. It received support from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
According to Joy Online.
