THE government is set to introduce new auditing model, where internal auditors will be equipped with new skills on fraud investigation.

The Internal Auditor General, Mr Mohamed Abdallah Mtonga said over the weekend that there are massive theft and misappropriation of resources in many public offices that needs specialized check and monitoring.

Closing a five days training workshop on 'Fraud Awareness' in Dar es Salaam over the weekend, Mr Mtonga urged chief executive officers and accounting Officers to have regular fraud prevention health check up, as it was least expensive way to find out organization's vulnerability to fraud.

"The situation in the public sector is not encouraging, the Controller and Auditor General revealed in the 2010/2011 financial year that 68 Local Government Authorities (LGAs), have not documented and approved fraud prevention and there were no processes that have been put in place for indentifying and responding to the risks of fraud in their councils," he said.

He said there were no quick solution to the challenge of fraud scenarios rather than to have initiatives to promote an anti-fraud culture, ethics and values. He said his department had enough internal auditors, but the remaining task was to train them to qualify as fraud examiners.

Commenting on the magnitude of fraud in the country, he said the country has a lot of big and small financial institutions and lending companies that are providing loans services to people especially employees hence causing financial pressure.

He challenged financial regulators like the Bank of Tanzania (BoT) to closely monitor the companies that are randomly dishing out loans to workers, hence directly or indirectly causing frauds in public offices. He was confident that workshop participants were equipped with skills on fraud detection and prevention in the country and will improve the quality of output expected by both the government and the general public.

On his side, the Executive Secretary of the Centre for Fraud Research and Investigation (CFRI), Mr Andendekisye Makabalula said his centre will next year conduct a survey on the magnitude of fraud and institutions prone to the problem.

"We will carry out a thorough study on the public institutions and come up with report on their magnitude of fraud and why. Our major concentration will be occupational fraud majorly on procurement and tendering areas," he said.