On Wednesday, three finance ministers, four Central Bank governors and the chiefs of eight commercial banks will file into the Chamber of the House of Representatives to answer a question that should shame every one of them: Where did the money go?
The General Auditing Commission's special reconciliation audit, covering July 2018 to December 2024, is not a routine accounting exercise. It is a portrait of a revenue system in disrepair. Auditors could not trace US$91.8 million and L$12.7 billion in net variances between what commercial banks collected on government's behalf and what arrived in the General Revenue Account. Cumulative variances between the Liberia Revenue Authority's own tax system and the consolidated account climbed to a staggering US$373.9 million and L$16.7 billion. In a country where clinics lack drugs, schools lack benches and civil servants wait on delayed pay, these are not abstractions. They are stolen possibilities.
Consider what the auditors found. Banks bound by agreement to sweep tax collections into the Central Bank within 24 hours took as long as 24 days to do so, and not a single one consistently met the deadline over six years. Money meant exclusively for the public purse was tapped for school fees and casual online transfers. Reversals worth millions could not be matched to any original transaction. Customs records worth nearly a billion United States dollars carried duplicated receipt numbers, and US$833.8 million more carried no receipt numbers at all. And when auditors asked some banks and mobile money operators for statements, they simply refused to hand them over.
That refusal deserves particular contempt. An institution that collects public revenue and then declines to show the public its books has forfeited any claim to good faith. The Legislature must not let it pass. Lawmakers have subpoena powers and the Central Bank has regulatory teeth. Both should be used, visibly and without apology.
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We are equally troubled by what the audit says about the state itself. Three institutions sit at the heart of revenue collection: the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning, the LRA and the Central Bank of Liberia. Yet auditors found no written policy assigning reconciliation responsibility among them. For six years, across the administrations of Samuel Tweah, Boima Kamara and now Augustine Ngafuan, hundreds of millions of dollars moved through a system in which nobody was formally responsible for confirming the money arrived. When everyone is in charge, no one is. That is not an oversight. It is an invitation.
The officials summoned will come armed with explanations. Indeed, they already offered them to the auditors: timing differences, bulk sweeps, system architecture. Auditor General P. Garswa Jackson Sr. and his team examined those claims and rejected most of them, noting they were unsupported by reconciliation reports and that the variances persisted no matter the methodology applied. Lawmakers should therefore refuse to accept on Wednesday what the auditors would not accept on paper. The burden of proof now rests on the officials, not on the GAC.
We have seen this film before, and we know how it usually ends. A damning audit lands. A hearing is convened. Cameras roll, officials express concern, committees promise follow-up, and the report is quietly shelved beside its predecessors. Liberia's shelves groan under the weight of unimplemented audit recommendations. If the Joint Public Accounts Committee allows this report to join them, Wednesday's hearing will amount to theater, and expensive theater at that.
It need not end that way. The committee should emerge from this hearing with concrete commitments and deadlines: a binding reconciliation framework among the three institutions, closure of transitory accounts as the regulations already require, recovery of unauthorized withdrawals and unexplained fees, sanctions for banks that flouted the 24-hour sweep rule, and referral to the Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission and the Ministry of Justice wherever the evidence points to criminality. Where money cannot be accounted for, someone must be held to account. The two cannot be separated.
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President Joseph Boakai campaigned on rescuing this country from exactly this culture of impunity. His government inherited part of this mess, but it now owns the response. The finance minister who received this audit serves at his pleasure. The public will judge the administration not by the vigor of its rhetoric but by whether a single dollar of consequence follows this report.
The people of Liberia paid these taxes. They queued at collectorates, cleared goods at the ports and gave up their hard-earned dollars on the promise that government would use them well. They are owed more than a hearing. They are owed the truth, the money and the reforms that ensure this editorial never has to be written again.
