The Audit Service is hosting a 2-day workshop on “Advancing Audit Accountability: How Can We Strengthen Responsiveness and Action?” organized by the International Budget Partnership in Accra. The key expected outcome from this workshop is the advancement of plans to enhance government accountability through improved communication and collaboration

The Auditor-General, Mr Daniel Domelevo, who chaired the opening ceremony welcomed participants to the country. He remarked that Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) provide public service and therefore SAIs must be responsive to their key actors who are the public and bring them on board and remain accountable to them.

The workshop also seeks to generate evidence on how audits become tools for enhancing government accountability from lessons learned at the workshop. In addition, it is testing a hypothesis that improved communication and enhanced engagement between key oversight actors from within and outside government; and on how this can promote action on select audit findings that are currently being ignored by government.

Participants hope to share various approaches to communicate audit findings and encourage the uptake of audit recommendations, develop collaboration approaches that could further audit impact and identify the ways in which participants can work together going forward.

These objectives will be done through three general areas which are: “How are we taking the contextual dynamics into account in our strategies to enhance government responsiveness?; How can we advance our plans to strengthen communication and collaboration for greater audit impact?; and How can we work together to enhance communication and collaboration for audit accountability?

The meeting brought together participants from SAIs and legislatures, civil society representatives who have engaged extensively with audit agendas in their countries and international public finance specialists who are knowledgeable on audits.

Present at the opening ceremony were the Special Prosecutor, Mr Martin A. B. K Amidu; Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, Hon. James A. Klutse; former Auditor-General of the Philippines, Ma. Gracia M. Pulido-Tan; Auditor-General of Sierra Leone, Mrs Lara Taylor-Pearce; Senior Director of Policy at the International Budget, Mr Vivek Ramkumar; the Chairman of the Audit Service Board, Prof. Dua Agyeman and all his members as well as Deputy and Assistant Auditors-General of the Service.