Commonwealth internal auditors attend workshop

18/02/08

Story: Musah Yahaya Jafaru
PUBLIC sector internal auditors from 10 Commonwealth countries have begun a three-week programme in Accra that seeks to give them hands-on experience in internal audit practice.
The participants are using international best practice in internal audit and Ghana’s public sector as a case study. The programme involves presentations, field visits and debriefing sessions.
The internal audit exchange programme, the first of its kind in any Commonwealth country, is being organised by the Internal Audit Agency in collaboration with the Commonwealth Secretariat. It is under the Commonwealth Secretariat’s thematic fellowship programme.
Commonwealth countries attending the programme are Ghana, Malawi, Tanzania, Tonga, Botswana, Zambia, Sierra Leone, Mauritius, Malaysia and Solomon Islands.
The Chief Director at the Office of the President, Mr Liberio Bazaa Tusoe, opened the programme yesterday and read a speech on behalf of the Chief of Staff and Minister of Presidential Affairs, Mr Kwadwo Mpiani.
Mr Mpiani urged the participants to make the most of the programme to enhance internal audit practice in the public sector of their respective countries.
“You can achieve this by sharing your country experiences and identifying which approaches and procedures work better in other countries and how they can be tailored to your own countries,” he stressed.
Mr Mpiani expressed the hope that the exchange programme would add value to their respective countries’ public financial management objectives.
He noted that since the onset of the new millennium, Ghana had embarked on “an ambitious” programme to reform its public financial management systems.
That, he said, resulted in reforms in the area of internal auditing in the public sector, saying that “we believe we have made significant progress by providing the appropriate legal framework, and developed a practical professional practice framework and human resource to ensure that internal audit supports government’s programmes to ensure public sector accountability and performance”.
Mr Mpiani commended the Commonwealth Secretariat for their technical and financial inputs and the Internal Audit Agency for organising the programme.
The Director-General of the Internal Audit Agency, Mr Patrick Nomo, stressed that the programme would afford the participants the opportunity to learn from one another while recognising their peculiar cultural environments and their common vision of reaching excellence in identified thematic areas.
He said Ghana had and experience worth studying in internal audit reforms in the public sector.
Mr Nomo said the Commonwealth Secretariat’s framework for Internal Audit Reforms was the only one in the world “and Ghana’s reforms are in full compliance with the framework”.