Johnson Akuamoah Asiedu, Auditor-General.
Teachers at the University of Ghana (UG) are demanding the resignation of the Auditor-General, Johnson Akuamoah Asiedu, over a recent report which implicated the country’s premier university.
At a press conference on Tuesday, May 20, the Secretary of the University of Ghana Chapter of the University Teachers Association of Ghana (UTAG-UG), Dr. Jerry Joe Harrison, faulted the Auditor-General over claims of irregularities in a recent payroll audit report.
The report had indicated that the university overstated employee compensation by GH¢59.2 million, an assertion that the university management had debunked.
According to Dr Harrison, the initial audit report was not shared with them for clarification and/or comments, if any, before the report was made public.
“This is a serious breach of the ethical standards required for this profession. For such a basic ethical ethos to be ignored clearly smacks of incompetence and/or mischief,” he stated, adding, “We therefore call for the Auditor-General to resign honourably, or we will petition the President for his removal”.
Additionally, he is requesting punishment for all individuals involved in the audit in accordance with the ethics of the profession.
“We also want to state that the situation where auditing has been used as a tool to disallow payments of legitimate claims from sub-vented institutions must stop with immediate effect,” he added.
Details of the report suggested that between 2022 and 2024, the University submitted salary claims totalling GH¢1.09 billion.
However, only GH¢1.03 billion was cleared by the Auditor-General’s office after verification, revealing GH¢59.24 million in overstatements.
The report covers broader financial recoveries based on recommendations from 2020 to 2023 Auditor General reports, including disallowances and payroll savings up to December 31, 2024.
Shortly after the report was released, UG’s Acting Deputy Internal Auditor, Prof. Samuel Simpson, dismissed the claims as misleading and lacking proper context.
He explained to MyJoyOnline that “the numbers alone don’t tell the full story.”
“There are processes and engagements behind these figures that the Auditor-General’s report fails to capture. To suggest the university overstated employee compensation is simply incorrect.”
The university maintained that what auditors flagged as “overstatements” were actually legitimate uses of internally generated funds (IGF) to supplement government payroll allocations.
Prof. Simpson provided this example: “Let’s say, if government of Ghana decides to say that, look, I can pay for two staff of the University of Ghana, but the University of Ghana needs, let’s say, five staff to teach so they can give quality to our clients, that is, students.”
“And the University of Ghana decides to use its own IGF to take care of the extra three, do you call that savings? It is not savings. Is it an offense for a university to be transparent to say that, look, government of Ghana, this is how much you have planned to pay this number of staff but through our own initiatives, we’ve been able to mobilize IGF and we say that look for us to be able to deliver this kind of service. Clearly see how much we have set aside to take care of the rest that you are supposed to do as a state, and that is considered to be payroll fraud? As I said, the university management will issue a response to that effect,” he further explained.
Prof Simpson stressed that the university had properly documented all such expenditures.
“There are a lot of things that the auditor’s report doesn’t capture. The processes, the engagement that goes through, where it starts from and where it gets through, there is no way that the university engaged in any payroll fraud as is kind of alleged in this release, suggesting that the university has overstated employee compensation.”
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