The Auditor General’s Report of 2018 has indicted the Office of the President for failing to properly account for USD $9,600 DSA allowance and Le Le2, 880, 000.99 which were respectively allotted to a team that was supposed to travel to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia to attend the African Union Conference via Conakry, Guinea where they were supposed to have conducted some official business.
The sum of USD 9,600 was therefore approved by the Vice President’s Office and subsequently paid to officers to cover their Daily Subsistence Allowance with a view for them to accompany the Hon. Vice President on the Freetown to Conakry and back leg of his journey.
The report had also mentioned that an imprest of Le2,880,000.99 was also allocated for the purchase of fuel for the vehicles on that leg of the journey but that records presented for audit inspection had rather shown that the Vice President and few of the officers who were scheduled to accompany him to Addis Ababa flew from Lungi International Airport to Accra, and then to Addis Ababa, instead of driving to Conakry and flying from there to Addis Ababa as proposed for which they had received such whooping sums.
This, according to AASL, had actually meant that those officers who had been given DSAs for their visit to Conakry did not actually travel to Conakry at all, and that amounts allocated for fuel was not utilized either.
The Office of the Vice President, AASL noted, had acknowledged that it was indeed true that the Vice President’s team did not travel to Addis through Conakry as the auditors have observed and that they have also failed to recover the said sums from the officers involved even though they had not travelled by road.
The Office of the Vice President had assured the Audit Service Sierra Leone that they would recover such monies from the officers whenever they had such trips in the future which will attract per diems.