Adamawa Auditor General’s Office Trains Newly Recruited Staff, Tells Them Integrity Is Not Optional, “Once It Is Compromised, Public Confidence Is Lost”

The Office of the Auditor General of Adamawa State has taken an institutional step that is more significant than its administrative description suggests: it has trained its newest staff before deploying them, and it has done so with the kind of senior-level presence and professional seriousness that signals how the office understands its own function.

The capacity-building workshop, themed “Foundation of Public Sector Auditing and Accountability”, was formally declared open by the Head of Service, Pharm. Shehu Isa Ardo mni, and drew commissioners, permanent secretaries, professional auditors, experienced facilitators, and the newly recruited officers themselves into a day of structured orientation and knowledge transfer designed to prepare young public servants for the responsibilities of financial oversight in a state government context.

The Auditor General, Alhaji Usman Ahmed Biri, FCNA, set the tone from the first moment. His welcome address was not congratulatory in the conventional sense. It was a charge, framed around the nature of the office these officers had just joined and the standard they would be held to from their first day of full deployment.

“The Office of the Auditor General occupies a sensitive and strategic position in safeguarding public resources and ensuring financial discipline across government institutions,” he told the participants. He named the core values of the auditing profession explicitly: honesty, discipline, professionalism, confidentiality, dedication, and impartiality. None of these, he made clear, are aspirational qualities to grow into over time. They are entry requirements.

His most memorable formulation was direct in the way that only years of watching what happens when the standard slips can make a senior official. “Once integrity is compromised, public confidence is lost.” That sentence deserves to be read in the context of what an auditor general’s office actually does: it checks the books of every other government institution. If the people doing the checking cannot be trusted, nothing that follows can be trusted either.

What the Training Covered

The workshop featured technical sessions facilitated by practitioners whose combined experience spans decades of public financial management at every level of Adamawa’s government structure.

Mr Daniel G. Sakiyo, ACA, Assistant Director Audit, delivered sessions on vouching in auditing, covering the fundamental verification techniques that form the operational backbone of any audit exercise. Mr Peter Burwaja, FCA, a retired Director of Quality Assurance, handled the audit manual and procedures, grounding new officers in the institutional frameworks within which their professional judgements must operate. Mr Henry Bagume, a former Director in the Auditor General’s office who retired as a Permanent Secretary, spoke extensively on professional ethics, drawing on a career that has seen the civil service at its best and its most vulnerable. Mr Nasa Umaru, CNA, a serving Director, presented on audit reporting standards, the output framework through which everything the office discovers is converted into findings that government and the public can act on.

The workshops were not the first training the officers received. Three weeks of departmental on-the-job exposure had already been completed before the formal workshop, with new staff posted across the office’s five departments for practical orientation before assuming full responsibilities. The formal training session built on that foundation rather than starting from scratch.

What the Senior Voices Said

The Head of Service, Pharm. Shehu Isa Ardo, commended the Auditor General for what he described as a timely and strategically important initiative and praised Governor Fintiri for his commitment to strengthening public institutions through human capital investment. He charged the new officers to see themselves as ambassadors of integrity, reminding them that the future credibility of the civil service depends on the conduct and competence of the generation now entering it.

The senior officials in attendance, including Commissioner for Rehabilitation, Reconstruction and Reintegration, Hon. Barr. Bello Hamman Diram; Commissioner for Works, Hon. Engr. Mohammed Suleiman; Permanent Secretary of the Civil Service Commission, Alhaji Abubakar Umar; and the Local Government Auditor General, Mr Bashir Yusuf, each delivered goodwill messages that reinforced the same theme: that the auditing profession demands credibility, objectivity, and courage in equal measure, and that protecting the confidentiality of official information while maintaining the independence to report what is found are not competing values but inseparable ones.

Participants described the sessions as insightful, impactful, and professionally enriching. That is the response that every training workshop claims to produce. What will distinguish this one is whether the values transmitted in the workshop room survive contact with the realities of public service in a state where financial pressures, political interests, and personal relationships create the conditions in which integrity is tested daily.

The Auditor General’s office has done its part by training them before testing them. The test begins when the files land on their desks.