AIT is now official. Over the last five years, Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies have spent GH¢22.4 million paying revenue collectors, only to collect GH¢10.26 million in return. Let that sink in. We spent more than double what we made.
We paid people to lose money for us. And this is not a one-off mistake.
It is a pattern repeated every year from 2021 to 2025, documented by the Auditor-General and ignored by those who should act.
The Daily Graphic’s review of the Auditor-General’s reports shows a rot that has become normal. In 2021, 163 collectors at 31 assemblies took home GH¢3.04 million in salaries but mobilised just GH¢1.63 million. A loss of GH¢1.41 million.
In 2022 and 2023, the trend continued. Collectors generated only 55 per cent and 43.68 per cent of their salaries respectively.
Then came 2024 — the worst year.
Two hundred and forty five collectors at 55 assemblies were paid GH¢11.74 million.
They brought in GH¢4.78 million. That is a shortfall of GH¢6.96 million in one year alone.
In 2025 things improved slightly. Fewer assemblies were affected. But 55 collectors still cost GH¢2.84 million while generating GH¢1.49 million. Another GH¢1.35 million down the drain.
Some individual collectors earned between GH¢50,000 and GH¢90,000 a year, yet mobilised only GH¢6,000 to GH¢40,000.
The list of affected MMDAs cuts across the country: Kumasi Metro, Sekyere Central, Asokore Mampong, Berekum, Dormaa, Talensi, Jomoro, Garu, Ketu South, Effutu, Suhum, and many more. Almost every region is represented.
This directly contravenes Section 52 of the Public Financial Management Act, 2016 (Act 921).
The law demands value for money. What we have is value for waste.
When an assembly loses money on revenue collection, it is your road that is not graded.
It is your clinic that has no drugs.
It is your market that has no toilet. It is the school block that is delayed.
Internally Generated Funds are supposed to fix local problems. Instead, we are using IGF to fund inefficiency.
We are taxing citizens, then wasting the tax before it can work for them.
The assessment of tax consultant, Albert Kungmaa Ziem, in our report is correct and does not need softening: the taxpayer would have been better off keeping the money than paying to have it inefficiently chased.
When a system produces that outcome for five consecutive years, “inefficiency” is a generous word.
What we are looking at is a payroll that functions independently of performance, in a country that can no longer afford payrolls of that kind.
The Auditor-General’s recommendations have been on the table for years.
Assemblies have not moved.
That inertia is a choice, made possible by the absence of consequence.
No
Chief Executive has lost their post over this.
No revenue collector drawing GH¢90,000 against GH¢6,000 collected has been shown the door.
Until that changes, next year’s report will read like this one, and the year after that.
We do not need new legislation to fix this. Section 52 of the Public Financial Management Act already exists.
What is missing is the will to enforce it.
Ahmed Ibrahim, as Minister for Local Government, Chieftaincy and Religious Affairs, sits directly astride this file.
His ministry cannot claim not to have seen these numbers; they are published every year, assembly by assembly, and this year they name Kumasi twice.
The question is not whether the Minister is aware.
It is what he intends to do about assemblies that reappear on this list every year, without sanction.
Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee has its own role here, and it has not been idle on other fronts.
However, a report of this nature, persistent, quantified, spanning five years and dozens of assemblies, deserves more than a hearing and a resolution urging compliance.
It deserves a public accounting of which Chief Executives were told to fix this and did not, and what happened to them afterwards.
If the answer is nothing, that too should be published.
The 2025 figures, showing 14 assemblies instead of 55, are not evidence of reform.
They are evidence that when someone finally looks closely, the number moves.
That is precisely the problem: oversight that only bites when a newspaper adds it up is not oversight, it is embarrassment management.
The minister and the committee have the numbers.
They have had them for years. What they have not yet supplied is a reason why an assembly that pays GH¢90,000 to collect GH¢6,000 should still have that collector on its books come January.
The Daily Graphic will be watching to see whether this year’s report produces action or simply another round of the same disappointing arithmetic.
Ghanaians who pay their taxes and rates on time are entitled to know that the state, at a minimum, is not losing money on the exercise of asking them to.
