Appraising financial controls at the Okomfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, Kumasi
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Date
2008-06-26
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Abstract
This long essay is mainly embarked upon to examine the effectiveness of internal control systems in place at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in its quest to deliver excellent healthcare to its clients. For the purposes of this work, attention was focused on financial and accounting control by examining three key questions as regarding; (1) existence of proper internal financial control that is consistent with the company
objectives and the role of employees in ensuring the success of this plan?
(2) how effective and efficient is this system in streamlining procedures, policies,
plans, procedures, laws, regulations, and contracts that reduce the incidence of omissions and fraud to produce reliable financial information
(3) How could internal control be improved in this organisation.
There is theoretically no restriction on what internal control can evaluate and report about within an organization. However, internal financial control tends to vary from one company to another, reflecting particular objectives of directors, and senior management.
Primary data was obtained through the administration of surveyed questionnaires to the sampled respondents at the account section of the hospital to ascertain the needed information for analysis and recommendation. Statistical software was used to analyse the data received from respondents in percentiles.
Some findings that needed urgent attention to ensure that controls were effective are as follows; policy overrides by management, poor file management, segregation of duty, inadequate intranet facility which causes delays in data input which result in unnecessary idle time; poor receipt check at the monitoring unit because the number of workers in this section is relatively small. There is also the problem of transferring fund from one account to another (i.e. GOG, DPF, and IGF) that delays business of the hospital. It was recommended that, the hospital administration should take steps to address the aforementioned problems without further delay to be able to deliver the excellent healthcare to the public.
For the limited time within which the long essay had to be completed and difficulty regarding finance, attention was only focused on financial control only. I would urge other researchers to take up the challenge to examine other aspects of internal control in the hospital regarding procurement, and maintenance sections to offer useful suggestion that could help maintain good corporate governance.
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A thesis submitted to the Board of Postgraduate Studies, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the Degree of Master of Business Administration, 2008