The Budget Advocacy Network and Non-State Actors on PFM are calling on Parliament and the Ministry of Finance to act as 44 government institutions quietly ignore a legal obligation to account for public money
In a country where public institutions are routinely expected to demand accountability from citizens, 44 of those same institutions have refused or failed to account for themselves.
As of May 2026, forty-four public entities in Sierra Leone have not submitted their financial statements for the 2025 fiscal year, in direct violation of Section 86(1) of the Public Financial Management Act of 2016. The law is unambiguous: within three months after the close of a financial year, the vote controller of every public entity is legally required to submit annual financial statements to the Auditor-General. That deadline has passed. The silence from these institutions is deafening.
The Budget Advocacy Network (BAN) and the Non-State Actors working on Public Financial Management in Sierra Leone (NSA-PFM) issued a joint statement on 4th May 2026, condemning what they describe as an “alarming failure” one that strikes at the heart of Sierra Leone’s public financial management architecture.
“Compliance with this law is not optional,” the statement reads. “Rather, it is a legal and moral obligation.”
The list of defaulting entities is not a collection of obscure agencies tucked away at the margins of government. It cuts across the very core of the Sierra Leonean state institutions entrusted with public health, infrastructure, media regulation, national security, education, and social welfare.
Among the 44 are the National Public Health Commission, the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Corporation, the National Minerals Agency, the Central Intelligence and Security Agency, the Sierra Leone Roads Authority, the National Telecommunication Authority, the Pharmacy Board of Sierra Leone, and Ernest Bai Koroma University named after a former president.
Also on the list are the Independent Media Commission, which is responsible for regulating the country’s press landscape; the National Commission for Children; the Justice Sector Coordination Office; and the National Drugs Law Enforcement Agency. The Parliamentary Service Commission an institution directly linked to the legislature features alongside the Office of the Ombudsman, whose entire mandate rests on public accountability.
West Africa Holdings, the entity behind Freetown’s Radisson Blu hotel, also appears on the list, as does the Sierra Leone National Shipping Company, the Guma Valley Water Company, and the Sierra Leone Road Safety Authority.
Taken together, these are not peripheral agencies. They are the skeleton of the Sierra Leonean state and their collective silence on public finances represents what civil society groups are now calling a governance emergency.
The Public Financial Management Act of 2016 was designed precisely to prevent this kind of institutional evasion. Section 86(1) gives no room for interpretation: financial statements must be submitted, on time, every year, without exception.
But BAN and NSA-PFM are going further. In their statement, they invoke Section 3g(i) of the Audit Service Amendment Act of 2023 a provision that recommends that the emoluments and allowances of any person who fails or refuses to submit the required annual financial statement should be withheld.
In plain terms: those responsible should stop being paid until they comply.
The organisations are calling on the Ministry of Finance and Parliament to impose immediate sanctions on defaulting entities, arguing that continued inaction will erode public confidence and further weaken service delivery across the country.
What is at risk here goes well beyond bureaucratic tidiness. When public institutions do not submit financial statements, the Auditor-General cannot audit them. When they cannot be audited, Parliament cannot scrutinise how public money was spent. When Parliament cannot scrutinise spending, citizens have no visibility into whether roads were actually built, medicines were actually procured, or security funds were properly deployed.
BAN and NSA-PFM warn that this failure “cripples the national audit process, undermines parliamentary oversight, and creates dangerous blind spots in the management of public funds.” They flag the real possibility of financial mismanagement, weak internal controls, and crucially a deepening culture of impunity within public institutions.
Sierra Leone has, in recent years, made measured progress in strengthening its public financial management systems. The 2016 Act itself was a reform milestone. But reform architecture means nothing if the institutions it governs choose to ignore it without consequence.
The demands from BAN and NSA-PFM are specific and legally grounded. They are not calling for dialogue or further review processes. They are calling for enforcement the kind that the law already authorises and that Sierra Leone’s governance credibility now urgently requires.
Parliament must take up this matter as a matter of constitutional seriousness. The Ministry of Finance must move beyond issuing circulars and begin applying the sanctions the law already provides. And the Audit Service Sierra Leone must invoke the Audit Service Amendment Act and treat the withholding of emoluments not as a last resort, but as the appropriate and immediate response to non-compliance.
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Sierra Leone cannot afford a system in which the institutions responsible for managing public money are themselves allowed to operate above the law that governs public money. That is not governance. That is impunity — and it has names, forty-four of them, printed in a table for all to see.
