The Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) has demanded that the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) provide it all the requested data, allow access to its bank statements for auditing.

Vice president of IMANI-Africa, Bright Simons, made this known when he shared portions of the PURC's statement on the matter on his platform on X.

In early March this year, Bright Simons, provided documents that indicate that the Electricity Company of Ghana withheld information from Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PWC) tasked with validating ECG's revenue accounts.

"PWC, the auditors tasked by govt of Ghana to check if the under-pressure state electricity utility, ECG, is handling its finances properly is struggling to get data from ECG. Its ledger of monies paid out by ECG in Sept 2023 doesn't even list the big private power producers," he wrote in a post on X.

Per the document shared, PWC admitted that it reached out to the ECG for its customer billing and collections, and the bank statements for the Single Collection Account but failed to receive them.

The December 8, 2023, press statement released by PWC indicated that they were informed on November 30, 2023, by the General Manager for Financial Planning and Revenue Assurance that the Managing Director of ECG had instructed that they attend a meeting on December 7, 2023, at 10 am at ECG so that the data that they had requested, including the customer billing and collections, and the bank statements for the Single Collection Account for the period of their review, would be provided to them.

On December 7, 2023, PWC met the Managing Director of ECG as requested, however, "he stated during the meeting that ECG is unable to provide customer billing and collection data to a third party as this will contravene the Data Protection Act, 2012 (Act 843)."

"As such, we were not provided with any data or information at the meeting and to date we do not have any customer billing and collection data, nor do we have any of ECG's bank statements for the Single Collection Account for any of the periods to be covered by our review," the statement added.

The lack of this data and information, PWC said presented a significant limitation to the conduct of our work and without it they will be unable to perform any meaningful analysis towards the overall objectives of the assignment.

Accordingly, they requested an urgent meeting with the Chief Director at the Ministry of Energy, Mrs Asamoah, at her earliest convenience to discuss the next steps for the engagement.