The Internal Audit Agency
(IAA) has organised a day’s training workshop for Internal Auditors and Audit Committee Members from the Upper West and Upper East Regions, to enhance their knowledge of global auditing standards.
The training centred on the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) on financial statement standard adopted by the Controller and Accountant General’s Department in consultation with the Auditor General and the national adoption of the Global Internal Audit Standards (GIAS).
The workshop was also to introduce them to the upcoming Minister of Finance’s Public Financial Management (PFM) Commitment Control Compliance Checklist, which is currently going through a review process.
Mr Nathan Yankey, a Technical Advisor at the IAA, who took the participants through the training, explained that the workshop was to enable the participants apply those standards to their auditing activities to meet the required auditing standards and to achieve the quality of work that was expected.
He explained that the GIAS was aimed at evaluating and elevating the quality of internal audits across the globe, and it was important that once the IAA, the regulating institution of public sector internal audit practice had adopted the GIAS, also train the internal auditors on what they ought to do.
“The standard (GIAS) has brought in new dimensions to the public sector auditing landscape. It has given direction, it has given a whole coverage of the public sector and shown how it can affect public sector internal audit practice,” he indicated.
Mr Yankey observed that issues of the governance structure, organisational structure and funding could affect the effective implementation of the standards and it was important that they look at those various dimensions to position the public sector internal audit practice as it applied the standard.
He urged management of public institutions not to see internal auditors as police people who were there to witch hunt them, look for faults and report them but as aids to help them to achieve their objectives
Mr Mohammed Zaidu Yakubu, the Director of Internal Audit at the Wa Municipal Assembly, explained that the workshop had positively impacted their skills and would enable them practice internal auditing to international standards.
He said they had moved from cash accounting to accrual accounting, and they had been trained in that regard to enhance their auditing knowledge and skills.
He described internal auditing as a valuable addition to the services that institutional management provided, and that the internal auditor reminded management of the laws they needed to comply to operate within plans and budget lines.
“The internal auditor is a tool to management’s success in terms of project implementation. Officers and the public need to be educated much on internal auditing because it is an evolving area.
People need to understand that an internal auditor is a sort of consultant to that of the organisation to assist management to do the work as expected of them,” Mr Yakubu explained.
Mr Abodiba Halidu, the Internal Auditor at the Tempane District Assembly in the Upper East Region, stressed the important role of internal auditors in helping their institutions manage their financial problems to save them from appearing before the Public Accounts Committee.
He appealed to management of public institutions to heed the advice of internal auditors and implement their recommendation to prevent external auditors from finding fault with the intuitions, saying “They shouldn’t take us like police or enemies to them.”
Mr Halidu stressed the importance of capacity building for Internal Auditors on the Ghana Integrated Financial Management Information System (GIFMIS) to enable them work effectively as far as adopting the international standard of auditing was concerned.
