By Fatou Sillah
The National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Finance and Public Accounts has raised alarm over a mounting backlog of unreconciled government transactions amounting to billions of dalasis, warning that the discrepancies pose serious risks to transparency, financial discipline and public trust.
The concerns emerged during the committee’s review of the Auditor General’s reports covering the 2021 to 2024 financial years. Auditors found that several cash and bank transactions remained unreconciled despite adjustments made by management.
According to the reports, unreconciled receipts totaled D5.746 billion, while unreconciled payments amounted to D2.562 billion during the period under review.
Officials from the Accountant General’s Department acknowledged the backlog and cited systemic and operational challenges in tracing certain transactions. In testimony before the committee, the department attributed the problem in part to inconsistencies in transaction identifiers between government systems and commercial banks.
“The instances where you have inadequacy in terms of the description, because the system is designed in such a way that once you have a transaction, by default, the bank transaction should have the same unique identifier, but where the bank does not have the unique identifier, then it becomes difficult to reconcile. So, like I said, we have built a backlog, and we continue to analyze and clear this.”
Members of the committee questioned whether the existing reconciliation methods were adequate to handle such large sums. Alagie Mbowe, a member of the committee, expressed concern about the reliance on manual processes.
“I don’t know if it is humanly possible for you to do that manually,” he said. “Something needs to be done.”
Mr. Mbowe noted that the unreconciled amounts had continued to grow, rising from D2.7 billion to D8.5 billion, with projections of up to D14.9 billion requiring reconciliation in the 2024 government accounts.
In response, the Accountant General assured lawmakers that new systems had been introduced to prevent further backlogs, particularly in the processing of salaries.
“We have put mechanisms in place to ensure that we do not have a reconciliation backlog,” she said. “We are reconciling on a real-time basis, and we do not envisage this problem persisting in the future.”
Still, officials conceded that technological constraints continue to affect other categories of transactions.
“We have constraints in terms of the description whereby you cannot trace it to transactions in our system, so making that reconciliation really very difficult, and you know, we cannot do it automatically, nor can we do it manually, because if you cannot trace a transaction from your deal to the core banking system, that is a big constraint,” the AG said.
The committee said it would continue to monitor the issue as part of its oversight responsibilities, emphasizing the need for stronger systems to safeguard public finances.
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