Value for Money Office Act, 2026: Oversight or bottleneck?
Ghana’s public procurement landscape has long been beset by a persistent and costly malaise: the overinflation of government contracts.
Year after year, audit reports by the Auditor-General, parliamentary committee findings, and civil society investigations reveal the same troubling pattern — public projects executed at costs manifestly disproportionate to their actual value, single-source procurements awarded without rigorous scrutiny, and a trail of abandoned or substandard infrastructure projects that drain the public purse without delivering commensurate benefit to citizens.
It is against this backdrop that the Value for Money Office Act, 2026 was conceived and enacted.
The Finance Minister, Dr Cassiel Ato Forson, presented the Bill to Parliament in February 2026 as a decisive legislative intervention — one designed, in his words, to “institutionalise a comprehensive value-for-money framework to ensure that every cedi spent by the government delivers maximum benefit to citizens in terms of economy, efficiency, effectiveness, equity and sustainability.”
The legislation passed through Parliament amid heated debate, with the Minority Caucus vocally rejecting it as an unnecessary institutional duplication fraught with the potential for political abuse. President Mahama signed it into law on May 11, 2026.
The central legal question this article addresses is deceptively simple yet profoundly consequential: Does the Value for Money Office Act, 2026 represent a genuine and well-structured advance in Ghana’s public financial oversight architecture, or does it merely add institutional weight to an already crowded regulatory space while introducing risks of political capture that could neutralise its stated objectives?
Statutory scheme, mandate
a. Establishment and Institutional Character:
The Act establishes the Value for Money Office (hereinafter “the Office”) as a formal institutional body dedicated to overseeing public sector expenditure. The Office is tasked with scrutinising government contracts and spending to ensure transparency and to maximise the utility of public funds.
Critically, the Act introduces the Value for Money Certificate — a mandatory clearance instrument that must be obtained before major government contracts, particularly those processed through single-source procurement, are awarded.
The Office’s core responsibilities as articulated in the Act encompass: conducting value-for-money assessments across public institutions; issuing mandatory Value for Money Certificates prior to the award of major contracts; monitoring compliance with value-for-money principles across Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs); establishing benchmark values for all major public projects by category; and enforcing sanctions where breaches are found.
The Office is to be equipped with engineers, quantity surveyors and other technical personnel necessary for the performance of its mandate.
b. Governance, board composition:
The Act vests governance of the Office in a board.
It is the composition and accountability structure of this board that has attracted the most vigorous legal and political criticism.
Critics, including the Minority Leader in Parliament, Osahen Alexander Afenyo-Markin, have contended that the board is dominated by partisan political appointees and lacks the structural independence necessary for a credible procurement oversight institution.
The board’s accountability arrangements — particularly its reporting lines — have been cited as creating proximity to executive authority that could compromise the Office’s objectivity when evaluating contracts sponsored by the very government that controls its composition.
The Finance Ministry has defended the governance structure by emphasising that the Office will be fully operational by January 2027, with a six-month window allocated for the proper constitution of the board and the nomination of technical leadership.
The Deputy Minister of Finance, Thomas Nyarko Ampem, assured Parliament that the Office would not be a duplicate of the Public Procurement Authority (PPA) but would instead address a gap the PPA does not fill: while the PPA ensures procedural compliance, it does not adequately address cost efficiency, life-cycle costing, technical soundness, and post-contract verification.
Existing legal, institutional framework
A proper legal appraisal of the Value for Money Office Act demands an honest accounting of what already exists in Ghana’s public financial management architecture. The critics of the Act are correct to observe that Ghana does not suffer from a paucity of laws or institutions in this domain. The existing framework is, on paper, comprehensive.
The Public Financial Management Act, 2016 (Act 921) provides a robust legal basis for fiscal discipline, establishing principles of accountability, transparency, and value for money in the management of public finances.
The Public Procurement Act, 2003 (Act 663), as amended, regulates the procurement process, prescribes competitive tendering as the default method, restricts single-source procurement, and establishes the Public Procurement Authority as the oversight regulator.
Beyond these twin pillars, internal audit systems are mandated across public institutions, and the Auditor-General enjoys constitutional independence to audit and surcharge public officers for financial wrongdoing.
The Minority Leader is, therefore, not wrong when he argues that the principal failing of Ghana’s public financial governance has not been the absence of legal instruments but the chronic failure to enforce those that already exist.
The Auditor-General’s reports accumulate findings of financial irregularities year on year; surcharges are rarely recovered; procurement rules are bent or circumvented; and institutional capacity is perpetually underfunded.
In this context, the question becomes: will adding a new institution solve an enforcement problem, or will it merely add another layer of institutional architecture that will eventually suffer the same fate as its predecessors?
This is not a trivial concern. It is a recurring pathology in Ghanaian public administration that new institutions are created in response to governance failures, only for those new institutions themselves to become captured, underfunded, or rendered ineffective by the same political and structural dynamics that undid their predecessors.
The question for the
Value for Money Office is whether its design contains sufficient safeguards to avoid this fate.
Case for Act
Notwithstanding the foregoing concerns, there is a principled case to be made in support of the Value for Money Office Act, and an intellectually honest analysis must engage with it seriously.
First, the Act targets a specific and documented gap in the existing framework.
The Public Procurement Authority, however well-designed, is fundamentally a procedural regulator: it asks whether the right procurement process was followed, not whether the contract price reflects genuine market value.
Ghana has previously relied on external institutions — including the UK-based Crown Agents — to conduct value-for-money assessments on major government contracts.
The reliance on external bodies for this function is both expensive and ultimately unsuited to the needs of a sovereign state seeking to build indigenous institutional capacity.
The creation of a domestic office with technical expertise in benchmarking and cost verification is, in principle, a reasonable policy choice.
Second, the introduction of mandatory Value for Money Certificates for single-source procurement is a potentially transformative provision.
Single-source procurement has historically been one of the most abused procurement modalities in Ghana, enabling politically favoured contractors to receive inflated government contracts without competitive scrutiny.
Requiring prior certification before such contracts can be awarded introduces a substantive — not merely procedural — check on this practice, provided the certifying body exercises its mandate with genuine independence.
Third, the international comparative record supports the utility of specialist value-for-money institutions when properly constituted.
The United Kingdom’s National Audit Office, Canada’s Office of the Auditor General, and similar institutions in Australia and New Zealand have demonstrated that dedicated value-for-money oversight bodies, operating with structural independence from the executive, can deliver measurable savings in public expenditure and cultivate a culture of fiscal discipline within government.
The Finance Minister cited similar experiences in other jurisdictions when presenting the Bill to Parliament. The key variable in each case, however, is independence.
The writer is a legal practitioner/Principal Counsel,
Versus Legal & Advocacy PRUC, a law firm based in Abelemkpe, Accra.
