Professor Lord Mensah, a lecturer at the University of Ghana Business School (UGBS), has proposed that public officials involved in financial mismanagement and fiscal indiscipline be publicly exposed and humiliated.
According to him, this will go a long way toward addressing the public sector's escalating levels of financial irresponsibility and fiscal indiscipline.
He voiced his unhappiness with the rate at which public funds are mismanaged in an interview with Benjamin Akakpo on the AM Show on Wednesday.
To curb the surge, he proposed that public officials who mismanage state resources face harsher penalties. "I have yet to see if the law has seized someone and that person is being punished for causing financial harm to the state as a result of some of these irresponsible acts." That has yet to be seen by me. The question is whether or not the surcharging and other charges were made public.
If you wish to discourage individuals from engaging in particular financial behaviors, you must inform them of the type of punishment you imposed on those who caused the state to lose money. You have the right to punish them, but only in silence.
Perhaps you might levy a fee on them. In the end, they lose nearly three months' worth of pay. But who is aware of it? Nobody is aware. As a result, they'll likely keep doing what they're doing. However, if you make it public, everyone will know. He said that "naming and shaming" is crucial.
The UGBS instructor made the recommendation in response to IMANI Ghana's newest fiscal irresponsibility index, which was released on Tuesday. The Finance Ministry, according to authorities from the policy Think Tank, is the most fiscally imprudent ministry.
They went on to say that the Ministry has lost more than 11 billion cedis to the government. According to IMANI Ghana, the losses were caused by errors discovered in the Auditor-reports General's between 2013 and 2015.
"Over the 6-year period, the Ministry of Finance continually surfaced as the most irresponsible of the institutions," Dennis Asare, Research Consultant for IMANI Ghana, stated at the event in Accra on Tuesday, May 31.
According to the IMANI research on financial irresponsibility, over 13.4 billion cedis was lost to financial irresponsibility between 2015 and 2020, with the Finance Ministry responsible for nearly 90% of all financial irresponsibility instances.
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