Accra: When Ghana's Auditor-General released his 2024 annual report, the numbers were staggering. Financial irregularities totaling GH?18.4 billion had been uncovered across the public sector. Billions more - GH?8.1 billion, to be precise - were rejected from government claims submitted to the Ministry of Finance after a special audit conducted in partnership with international firms EY and PwC found them to be falsified or unsupported. The question no one seems to want to ask aloud is this: Where were the internal auditors?
According to Ghana Web, internal auditors exist in every ministry. They are enshrined in law. They are, in theory, the first and most critical line of defense against financial misconduct in Ghana's public sector. And yet, year after year, billions vanish on their watch.
Ghana is not without structure when it comes to internal auditing. The Internal Audit Agency (IAA), established by the Internal Audit Agency Act, 2003 (Act 658), was created as a central body to coordinate, facilitate, and provide quality assurance for internal audit activities across Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs) and Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies (MMDAs). On paper, it is a robust architecture. In January 2025, Ghana became the first country in the world to officially adopt the Global Internal Audit Standards (GIAS), launched jointly by the IAA and the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA).
At the heart of the dysfunction is a structural contradiction that governance experts have long flagged but that politicians have been slow to fix. In Ghana, internal auditors within MDAs report administratively to the Heads of those same Ministries and Government Agencies - the very officials whose financial decisions they are meant to scrutinize. They report functionally to Audit Committees, but the funding for their audit programs comes directly from the budgets of the agencies they audit.
Independence is not the only problem. Research into internal audit practice across Ghana's public sector paints a picture of a profession that is starved of resources and professional development. Studies have consistently found that internal audit units across government face understaffing, restricted access to financial records, insufficient technical skills, limited professional training, and inadequate budgets.
Even when Ghana's internal - and external - auditors do their work, the results frequently disappear into the bureaucratic ether. The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of Parliament has repeatedly observed that many MDAs simply fail to implement recommendations from audit reports. Investigations have identified a 'complex interplay of organizational, political, and attitudinal factors' that prevent audit findings from being acted upon.
The challenge is most acute at the district and local government level. Internal audit capacity in Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies is considerably weaker than at the national level. The spread of trained internal auditors across Ghana's many MMDAs is uneven, and in some areas, internal audit units exist in name only - chronically understaffed and operating without meaningful oversight.
Ghana's internal auditors are not, by and large, corrupt or indifferent. Many are professionals working diligently within deeply constrained systems. The 2024 Annual Internal Audit Conference, themed 'Consolidating Democratic and Accountable Governance in Ghana: Role of Internal Auditors,' brought together practitioners grappling seriously with these challenges.
Some voices are now calling for more radical restructuring. One widely-discussed proposal - the Independent Professionalized Audit-as-a-Service (IPAAS) model - would see internal audits outsourced to independent professional firms licensed by the Institute of Chartered Accountants, Ghana. Supervised by a multi-agency oversight committee drawn from the Auditor-General, the Office of the Special Prosecutor, EOCO, and others, audit firms would rotate across institutions to prevent collusion, while a central digital platform would publish findings in real time for civil society and journalists to track.
Ghana's GH?18.4 billion in 2024 irregularities is not simply a statistic. It is a mirror held up to a system that has the architecture of accountability without many of its essential supports. Internal auditors are in Ghana's government sector. They are at their desks, writing reports, filing findings, attending conferences, and adopting international standards. What they often lack is the independence to act freely, the resources to act thoroughly, the authority to compel cooperation, and the institutional support to ensure that when they raise the alarm, someone in power actually listens. Until those conditions change, the watchmen will remain - present in name, constrained in practice, and outpaced by the scale of the problem they are asked to solve.