It has emerged that, the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) did not seek approval from the Public Procurement Authority (PPA) and Parliament in six of its contracts with the Strategic Mobilisation Limited (SML).
This was contained in the full KPMG audit report on the contract released by President Akufo-Addo on Wednesday.
The report also stated that SML performed partially under the contracts under review.
The six contracts include Transaction Audit Services (effective from June 1, 2018), Contract Extension (effective from January 1, 2019), External Price Verification Services (effective from April 1, 2019) and Consolidation Services Agreement (Transaction Audit & External Verification Services) (effective from October 3, 2019).
The rest are; Measurement Audit of Downstream Petroleum Products (effective from October 3, 2019), and Addendum to Measurement for Downstream Petroleum Products Agreement (effective from July 29, 2020).
GRA’s contract with SML covered the monitoring and auditing of revenue within the petroleum downstream sector, and a subsequent contract for similar activities to be undertaken in the upstream petroleum sector.
The President after receiving the report from KPMG ordered the cancellation of the contract with SML for the upstream sector and a renegotiation of the contracts for the downstream sector.
The report added that, SML was incorporated on February 14, 2017, as SMEL.
GRA, however, between June 16, 2017, and the same September, made three attempts to contract SMEL under a single-source contract but was rejected by PPA.