Government has set an ambitious target to complete payments of all arrears owed contractors by 2019.<\/p>\n
This follows a validation process to audit the arrears bequeathed the NPP by the erstwhile NDC administration.<\/p>\n
The Finance Minister, Ken Ofori Atta disclosed this during his midyear budget review to Parliament on Monday.<\/p>\n
According to him, the settlement of the debts should afford some respite to meet other expenditure needs of the government.<\/p>\n
Speaking on the development, a Deputy Finance Minister, Kweku Kwarteng explained to\u00a0Citi Business News<\/strong>\u00a0the ministry is hoping to complete the auditing of the arrears by October.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are validating some of them and so far some of them have proven to be illegitimate\u2026the validation is being led by the Auditor General. Already, we have started with the statutory ones like the NHIS and GETFund.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe are taking steps to ensure not only that arrears development in the economy are suppressed but also those commitments we met, provided they prove to be legitimate, are paid off,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n According to the Deputy Minister, the government inherited arrears estimated at 7 billion cedis.<\/p>\n Ghana\u2019s debt stock as at May 2017 stood at 137.2 billion cedis.<\/p>\n This translates into a debt to GDP ratio of 67.5%.<\/p>\n Meanwhile Mr. Kwarteng maintains the government will work to break what he describes as the cyclical accumulation of debts.<\/p>\n \u201cUltimately we are trying to reduce the development of arrears in the economy so that down the years, we do not expect that people do business for government and those people cannot be paid because government says it does not have money. It\u2019s a culture we are confronting in the development of arrears in the economy; it\u2019s a weakness we have tolerated for so long.\u201d<\/p>\n –<\/p>\n By: Pius Amihere Eduku\/citibusinessnews.com\/Ghana<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Government has set an ambitious target to complete payments of all arrears owed contractors by 2019. This follows a validation process to audit the arrears bequeathed the NPP by the erstwhile NDC administration. The Finance Minister, Ken Ofori Atta disclosed this during his midyear budget review to Parliament on Monday. According to him, the settlement […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,171,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-341096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-local-economy","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=341096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341096\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=341096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=341096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=341096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}