The chief executive officer of the National Entrepreneurship and Innovative program (NEIP), Mr. Kofi Ofosu Nkansah has said the over one million cedis irregularities accusation cited in the 2021 auditor general’s report cannot be entirely true.

According to him, the procedure of the program allows the beneficiaries to be given tax holidays, as well as debts been written off, and for that matter it should be declassified as an irregularity.

He maintained that the auditor general could have consulted them, and bridges the figures before any conclusion could be made.

He stressed that even though he understands the workload of the auditor general, however, they should have made a conscious effort to reach out t the board of directors of the Accra Digital center for clarification on before they came out.

“they are a bit obstinate, I understand their workload but sometimes they make things difficult, our mandate was to provide space for startup businesses without any budget or facilities, so we decided to take some amount from them so we could ran operations, pay salaries and fuel our vehicles however since it is a startup, we couldn’t have drained everything on them so the board of directors wrote to the minister of communication to write of some of their debts because we couldn’t trust the successful grow of the business from the scratch” he explained.

He continues that almost 90 percent of digital startups collapse along the line which needed the government intervention because it was a subsidy and not commercial rate.

“The government made a conscious effort to spend on them so that when the businesses are sustained, they will hold hands with other startups, it’s not realistic for Accra Digital Centre not to write of the debt, he told Omanhene Yaw Adu Boakye on Sompa Tv morning show on Thursday, September 1, 2022.

The auditor general report captured GHS 1, 8761.92 IM irregularities during the 2021 auditor general’s report.

Source…www.sompaonline.com/Eric Murphy Asare