Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of parliament, Kweku Agyeman-Manu, has explained that there are sensitive arears in the report of the Auditor General on the judiciary that could not be put in the public domain.

Mr. Agyeman-Manu said the committee was surprised about the infractions in the Judicial Service, hence they decided to have an in-camera sitting to find out if the infractions were systemic or one-off events.

‘The infractions against Judicial Service, we ourselves on the committee were wondering how that could happen so we wanted to find out whether it was systemic or something went wrong and we didn’t think that we wanted the entire public to recognize what systemic challenges were in the judiciary,’ he said.

The PAC chairman said this to the press yesterday after an in-camera sitting with the Judicial Service when they appeared before the committee to respond to issues on the report of the Auditor General for the years ended December 2011, 2012 and 2013.

He noted that this was the first time they were sitting in-camera, adding that depending on the sensitivity of the issue the committee could decide to sit in-camera.

According to him, the Judiciary has accounting challenges and has prosecuted four people who were involved in financial irregularities.

Mr. Agyeman-Manu said ‘three were jailed and one took the option of refund so it was clear there was no basic accounting system in the judiciary. What they did after jailing the people was to hire accounting consultants to work on their books.’

He added that there were other sensitive areas which they could not put in their public domain and the Auditor General also did that by putting what the public should consume on their website, hence, they also thought it wise to do so.

He added that the Judiciary has cleared all the issues relating to some unearned salaries and issues of professional misconduct have been reported to the professional body of the officer involved.

‘They have corrected a lot of things. The 2012 report isn’t like the 2011 report because they have worked on the report.’ He said stressing that ‘we don’t want to put in the public domain some of the serious systemic challenges the Judiciary faces.

Over payment

According to the report of the auditor general, the judicial service overpaid an air-condition specialist by at least 10.000%.

Butex services was to be paid GHC2, 734.00 but was paid GHC273, 420.00 Also a copy sighted by JoyNews reveals that a contractor, Green Zone construction limited was also paid by 759%.

After some works at the regional office of the Registrar-General’s Department, Green Zone was paid more than GHC169, 000. The value of his work according to the audited account was GHC22, 250