The Executive Director for the Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP), Benjamin Boakye, has said it will be unethical for audit firm, KPMG to accept the president's order to audit SML deal.

He noted that the Ghana Revenue Authority is one of KPMG’s largest clients and may be in a conflict of interest if the firm goes on to accept to audit the deal between the GRA and SML.

He wrote on X on January 2, 2024: “KPMG has its integrity at stake if it accepts this job. It is a client of GRA and its investigation against the leaders of one of its LARGE portfolios is exceedingly suspicious. Simply unethical.”

In Bright Simons’ expansion piece on the details of the deal, he said: “As everyone knows, KPMG, like the other Big Four professional services firms, is heavily exposed to public sector work in Ghana. It is the advisor to the government on its pandemic relief small business stimulus package. It is advising the GRA, which is at the center of the SML storm, on recruitment of technical and other staff to boost delivery capacity. It manages the ESLA tax vehicle on behalf of the government.

“More to the point, it regularly pursues “revenue assurance” jobs from various government agencies, including the GRA. In some ways, therefore, it is a technical advisor to the GRA in some of the very areas it is being asked to investigate. It is also a competitor to SML in respect of some of the very areas it is being asked to investigate on. Literally all practice lines at KPMG are implicated in this assignment: audit, accounting, assurance/compliance, and consulting. With only 12 partners spread across these practice lines as at last count, the idea of interlocking Chinese walls is simply impractical in an assignment of this nature.”

SSD/AE