Ghana's missing billions: What 16 years of Auditor-General reports show

Every year, Ghana's Auditor-General submits a report to Parliament on how public money was spent and accounted for in the year under review. The report usually flags irregularities, that is, money that was lost, unaccounted for, unrecovered or exposed to loss across ministries, state institutions, district assemblies, schools and universities.

The report gets discussed for a few days, sometimes weeks, and then attention moves on until the next one is released.

Auditdata Gh set out to change that by collecting every Auditor-General report published from 2010 to 2025, 65 reports in all, across five separate audit streams, and building them into a single database. The platform breaks the numbers down by sector and tracks which government was in power at the time each irregularity was recorded.

This report looks at what that combined data shows, and how money has been lost over the last 16 years.

The total: US$19.96 billion in 16 years

According to the data, Ghana's Auditor-General has flagged a combined US$19.96 billion in financial irregularities in the public accounts between the 2010 and 2025 financial years. In cedi terms, the same figures add up to GH¢129.8 billion.

The party breakdown: NPP years account for 81% of the total

Broken down by administration, the NPP is in office for the financial years responsible for $16.22 billion (GH¢111.98 billion) of the total, across 40 reports. The NDC, in office for 2010 to 2016, and again from 2025, is responsible for $3.74 billion (GH¢17.82 billion), across 25 reports.

On this reading, the NPP years account for 81% of everything the Auditor-General has flagged since 2010.

To understand the figures, we must look at how the reports were attributed and how audit coverage has changed over the years.

Irregularities in the data are attributed to the government that was in office during the financial year that was audited, not the year the report was published. This means a report on the 2024 financial year, even if it was published in 2025, is counted against the administration that was in government in 2024.

The coverage problem
The Auditor-General's office does not audit the same set of institutions every year. There are five separate report streams: Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs); Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs); Public Boards, Corporations and other Statutory Institutions; pre-tertiary education institutions; and technical universities and public tertiary institutions.

All five streams were published consistently only from 2015 onward. In 2010 and 2011, only one usable report could be found. In 2012 and 2013, there were two. In 2014, there were four.

This matters for comparing the two parties. The early NDC years look smaller in the data not necessarily because less went wrong during those years, but because less was audited and published at the time.

To account for this, Auditdata Gh compared only the years where all five audit streams exist for both administrations (Full audit years).

Even on this more even comparison, the gap does not close completely. The NPP years still average about 2.9 times the annual cedi irregularity of the comparable NDC years, and about 2.5 times in dollar terms.

It should be noted that the NDC's full-coverage sample is small; two years at the end of one term, and one year at the start of another. This should be read as indicative rather than conclusive.

Where the money goes missing
Broken down by type of irregularity, one category makes up most of the total.

Two-thirds of everything the Auditor-General has flagged since 2010 falls under outstanding debts and unrecovered loans. These are money that the state or a state institution lent, billed or advanced, and never collected. This points to a problem with debt recovery and enforcement.

Payroll fraud, which includes "ghost names" on the government payroll and is often the most talked-about form of financial irregularity in public conversation, accounts for just 0.2% of the total flagged since 2010.

The composition also differs by administration. Under the NPP years, outstanding debts make up 74% of the dollar total. Under the NDC years, the same category makes up 40%, with tax irregularities (29%) and cash irregularities (25%) playing a bigger role.

State corporations
Looking at the data by audit stream shows a similar pattern of concentration.

Three-quarters of every audited cedi lost since 2010 sits in the state-owned enterprise and statutory institution sector including the energy utilities, funds, authorities and boards. District assemblies, which are frequently accused of waste and mismanagement in public discussions, account for just 0.3% of the total.

The single largest report in the dataset is the FY2021 audit of Public Boards, which recorded GH¢17.48 billion (US$2.91 billion) in one year, in one stream. The five largest reports in the entire dataset are all Public Boards audits.

The worst years, by dollar and by cedi value

Ranked by dollar value, the five worst years for irregularities are:

1. 2021 — $3.10 billion (GH¢18.63 billion)
2. 2017 — $2.95 billion (GH¢13.03 billion)
3. 2020 — $2.60 billion (GH¢14.98 billion)
4. 2022 — $1.93 billion (GH¢16.52 billion)
5. 2018 — $1.73 billion (GH¢8.34 billion)

In cedi terms, the ranking changes because the currency itself moved over this period. On this measure, 2024 is the worst year on record, at GH¢20.54 billion, followed by 2021 (GH¢18.63 billion) and 2022 (GH¢16.52 billion).

The sharpest jump in the data is between the 2016 and 2017 financial years, a four-fold increase in both cedis and dollars, from GH¢3.04 billion to GH¢13.03 billion. Both years had full five-stream coverage, so the increase is not simply a result of more institutions being audited.

Is the problem getting worse?
Looking at the full-coverage period from 2015 to 2024, irregularities grew at a compound annual rate of 20.3% in cedi terms. This is the figure that is likely to be quoted most often, and it is accurate.

But when the same figures are converted to US dollars using each year's own average exchange rate, the growth rate drops to 3.5% a year. Much of the cedi growth reflects the depreciation of the currency itself. The cedi moved from about GH¢3.79 to the dollar in 2015 to GH¢14.70 in 2024.

The cedi figure reflects what Ghana's budget is denominated in and what the country loses in real terms. The dollar figure removes the effect of depreciation and shows how the underlying volume of irregularity has changed, which is still increasing, but at a slower rate than the cedi figure alone would suggest.

Auditdata Gh's assessment is that audited irregularities are growing faster than zero, slower than the headline cedi figure suggests, and faster than the size of the economy alone would explain.

FY2025, the first year under the current NDC administration, recorded GH¢7.57 billion (US$682 million), a sharp drop from FY2024's GH¢20.54 billion. Because this is a single year at the start of a new term, and audits of a new administration's first year in office often reflect balances inherited from the previous government as much as new decisions, it is too early to describe this as a trend.

Why the numbers might be rising
The data shows what happened, but not why it happened. Several explanations are consistent with the pattern, and they are not mutually exclusive, and only the auditors can explain the trend from their perspective. Nevertheless, a few explanations can be extrapolated.

Currency depreciation.
A large part of the cedi-denominated growth disappears once the figures are converted using the exchange rate for each specific year. A debt that went unrecovered from 2018 to 2024 grew in cedi value without any new decision being made.

Wider and more thorough auditing.
The Auditor-General's coverage expanded significantly after 2015, and the office became more assertive from 2017 onward, including a campaign of disallowances and surcharges. Some of the increase reflects the auditor finding more irregularities, not the state losing more money.

Compounding unrecovered debt.
Because outstanding debts and loans make up most of the total, and uncollected balances are reported again in subsequent audits until they are recovered or written off, the same unpaid amount can appear more than once across different years. This makes the total a measure of exposure, rather than newly lost money each year.

The energy sector and state enterprise balance sheets.

The concentration of irregularities in Public Boards audits overlaps with the period during which Ghana's energy sector arrears and state enterprise liabilities grew substantially.

Weak enforcement.
Few of the surcharges issued by the Auditor-General have been enforced to the point of recovery. Where there is no real consequence for non-compliance, the same findings tend to repeat, and the data shows categories recurring year after year in the same institutions.

Crisis-era spending.
The 2020–2022 peak in the data overlaps with COVID-19 emergency procurement, as well as the period leading up to Ghana's 2022 debt distress and IMF programme.

What the data shows
Taken together, 16 years of Ghana's own Auditor-General reports point to three things.

The losses are concentrated, not spread evenly. Three-quarters sit within state corporations and boards, and two-thirds is money owed to the state that was never collected.

The losses are growing, though at a slower rate in real terms than the cedi figures alone suggest.

And the losses are repetitive, the same categories, in the same institutions, appearing again in successive years. This may be the most important finding for Parliament to consider. It is not evidence that the problem went unnoticed. It is evidence that noticing it has not led to change.

How this report was put together
Every figure in this report comes from a published Report of the Auditor-General on the Public Accounts of Ghana, sourced from the Ghana Audit Service's own publications page. Sixty-five reports covering financial years 2010 to 2025, across five audit streams, are included in the dataset.

Totals and category subtotals were taken from each report's summary of irregularities and checked against the narrative text of the report. Where the summary table and the narrative text did not agree, the summary table was used, and the discrepancy was noted.

Each report is attributed to the party in government during the financial year audited, specifically, NDC for FY2010 to FY2016 and FY2025, NPP for FY2017 to FY2024, not the year the report was published.

Cedi figures are reported as published. Dollar figures are converted using the average interbank exchange rate for the financial year in question, so a 2015 cedi is valued as a 2015 cedi, not at today's rate.

A few limitations are worth noting. Reports published before 2010 are not consistently available in a usable format and were excluded, so this report cannot speak to the years before 2010. Audit coverage was uneven before 2015, so any comparison between the two parties should rely on the full-coverage years. Outstanding debts and unrecovered loans may be reported again across multiple years, so the totals measure exposure rather than necessarily reflecting new losses each year. An irregularity is not a conviction, a finding of theft, or proof of personal enrichment. It is a control or accounting failure recorded by the state's own auditor. Some institutions are also audited irregularly, and some reports were published years after the year they covered.

The full dataset, dashboard and summaries are published at auditdatagh.com.

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