The president of the Ghana Chapter of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), Madam Rebecca Atswei Lomo, says successive governments lacked the political will to prosecute and sanction perpetrators of fraud and corruption in the country.
She asserted that until the laws which were established to prosecute fraudulent acts in the country were implemented, fraud and corruption would continue to remain the bane and annihilate the country with time.
“Our culture, social groupings and the zeal to protect each other when one does wrong doesn’t augur well for the fight against corruption. In our families when someone does something wrong we want to protect that person and we have taken this to the political sphere,” he told the Graphic Business on the sidelines of the two-day Anti-Fraud Conference Week organised by the ACFE at the Accra International Conference Centre last Thursday.
Fraud Conference
The annual fraud conference held yearly to mark the International Fraud Awareness Week and designed to help auditors and realtors is on the theme: ‘Winning the Fight against Fraud and Corruption in Ghana, a collective responsibility’.
It brought together anti-fraud and anti-graft industry stakeholders to assess and analyse Ghana’s position and foster stronger collaboration to minimise the impact of fraud and corruption in the country.
Cost of fraud
Miss Atwei Lomo revealed that the country lost 12.9 billion cedis to fraud last year according to the Auditor General’s Report and predicted that such fraudulent infractions are likely to increase in this year’s report.
“Politicians must stop doing unethical things, refrain from any fraudulent activity, not only them, all of us must do same to conquer fraud. We must all do the right thing,” she stated.
She called on all to be disciplined and work together in unison to make fraud the nation’s number one enemy.
Cyber Fraud
Delivering a lecture on the ethics of cyber fraud, Gilbert Dordor and ICT Security Manager called on the cyber-security community to protect the public interest and discharge their duties with integrity.
“We owe our clients the duty to be competent enough to perform our duties on fraud investigations, audit, IT and service with diligence,” he noted.
He stated that it was shared responsibility between cyber security experts and the general public to combat fraud and corruption in the country.
“The cyber community must hold in strict confidence all information concerning the business and affairs of clients without exception, they must also avoid any form of conflict of interest situation,” he stated.
He called on the anti-cyber fraud community to seek support and advance the interest of the fraud profession to ensure the public reposes confidence in their work.
