By Thomas Dixon in Freetown
232News
The issue of vouchergate is not new in Sierra Leone as politicians are always in the habit of doing fictitious vouchers to fleece the state of billions of Leones but Sierra Leoneans expect much more fiscal discipline from a government that professed a war against corruption.
However, several government audits have exposed massive corruption and fiscal indiscipline right from the office of the President and down to every other office in the country.
As such, a Performance Audit done by the Protector of the Public Purse (Audit Service) has revealed that billions have been paid to suppliers with no verification report.
“A review of the domestic arrears database maintained in excel spreadsheet disclosed that the database submitted was not fully maintained to provide complete public debt management information in accordance with the regulation stated above and data transparency,” the report stated
The report revealed that from the review of 265 samples of payment vouchers on the payment of Public Debt, they (Auditors) noted that 34 payment vouchers for domestic arrears which totalled Le64,027,894,366 were made to suppliers without verification reports or minutes from the PDMD.
“We observed that allocations and grants for MDAs which were not paid during the previous year are committed and paid as domestic arrears. These allocations and grants are not tied to any specific contract or invoice, but should be used as their operational running cost such as imprest,” the report noted.
The report further said that according to the Public Debt Bulletin 2020, the total public debt stock of Sierra Leone at the end of December 2020 amounted to Le30.71 trillion, of which external and domestic debts accounted for Le20.05 trillion and Le10.66 trillion, respectively.
