Noguchi officials failed to retire GH¢1.1m imprest – Auditor-General

The Auditor-General’s report for 2020 has revealed that some officers of the Noguchi Memorial Institute of Medical Research did not retire imprest advanced to them amounting to GH¢1,152,819.00 1016.

Regulation 288(1) of the Financial Administration Regulations, 2004 (L.I. 1802) states: ‘Imprest shall be retired at the close of a financial year and any imprest not so retired shall be adjusted to a personal advance account in the name of the imprest holder’.

However, the auditor-general’s report said: “During our review, we noted that an amount of GH¢1,152,819.00 was advanced to various officers at NMIMR upon their request for the implementation of field trips or practical expenses, workshops and conferences, local travel and subsistence and other honorariums, remained unretired as at the end of 2018”.

“We attributed this anomaly to lack of effective supervision by the accountant to ensure that staff fully account for imprest advanced within a stipulated timeframe”.

“The untimely retirement of imprest advanced impaired our ability to substantiate whether these expenditures were incurred for the intended purpose”, the report said.

It added: “We, therefore, recommended that the management should establish clear timelines for the retirement of imprest and failure should warrant the withholding of the imprest amount from the affected staffs’ salary”.

Again, the report said management “should ensure that the outstanding amount of GH¢1,152,819.00 are recovered from the respective officers”.

In its response, the management of NMIMR said: “Imprest holders have been requested to retire within a week after the exercise for which the imprest was taken is over”.

Also, the management added, “imprest holders are held as debtors in the university’s records and holders who fail to retire would have the amounts deducted from their salaries. Besides, an Accounts Receivable Office has been setup to follow up on all outstanding imprest.”