- IFPG Rejects GH¢22bn GoldBod Loss Claim, Says Audited Accounts Show GH¢5.44bn Surplus
The Institute of Fiscal Policy Governance has rejected claims that the Ghana Gold Board recorded losses of about GH¢22 billion in 2025, arguing that the figure improperly conflates GoldBod’s institutional accounts with financial costs arising from the Bank of Ghana’s Domestic Gold Purchase Programme.
The intervention deepens a politically charged dispute over where the economic costs of Ghana’s domestic gold purchasing architecture should be recognised and how risks, revenues and valuation losses should be distributed between GoldBod, the central bank and the broader public sector.
According to IFPG, GoldBod’s audited Statement of Financial Performance for the year ended December 31, 2025 recorded total revenue of GH¢5.554 billion against expenditure of GH¢109.585 million. That produced a surplus before exceptional items of GH¢5.444 billion and a surplus after exceptional items of approximately GH¢5.443 billion.
“These are not political estimates. They are figures contained in the audited financial statements of the institution,” IFPG said. “It is therefore plainly inaccurate to tell the Ghanaian public that GoldBod recorded a GH¢22 billion loss when its audited Statement of Financial Performance records a GH¢5.44 billion surplus after exceptional items.”
The institute’s argument responds to scrutiny from the Minority in Parliament, which has questioned how losses estimated at roughly US$1.7 billion under the wider domestic gold purchasing programme could appear on the Bank of Ghana’s books while GoldBod, which performs important functions within the same policy architecture, reports a substantial surplus.
Minority Leader Alexander Afenyo-Markin has raised questions around service and assay fees, discounts on gold sold to off-takers and exchange-rate differences, arguing that the economic cost should be examined irrespective of which public institution ultimately carries it on its balance sheet.
IFPG says that argument becomes misleading if it moves from scrutinising the consolidated economic cost of the policy to describing losses recognised by the central bank as GoldBod’s own audited institutional losses.
“The fundamental defect in the Minority’s argument is the apparent conflation of the financial statements of GoldBod with the financial consequences of the Bank of Ghana’s Domestic Gold Purchase Programme,” the institute said.
“GoldBod and the Bank of Ghana are separate public institutions with separate statutory functions, accounting records, balance sheets and reporting obligations.”
That distinction is central to the controversy. A public policy programme can generate financial gains or losses for the state without every participating institution recording those outcomes in its own accounts, particularly where different entities perform aggregation, financing, reserve management, trading or settlement functions.
GoldBod can therefore report a surplus while the Bank of Ghana simultaneously recognises losses or valuation effects associated with another component of the programme. The existence of that accounting distinction, however, does not by itself answer whether the broader gold purchasing architecture has generated a positive or negative economic return for the public sector as a whole.
That is where the Minority’s challenge retains significance.
The question is no longer merely whether GoldBod itself booked a loss, but whether the allocation of revenues and costs across institutions provides a complete picture of the economics of the programme. If GoldBod earns fees or surpluses from transactions while another state institution absorbs exchange-rate, pricing or funding costs connected to those same transactions, scrutiny of the consolidated public-sector position remains legitimate.
IFPG nevertheless insists that such scrutiny must be backed by accounting evidence if a specific loss is to be attributed directly to GoldBod.
“Where is the audited schedule establishing the alleged GH¢22 billion loss against GoldBod? Where is the transaction by transaction reconciliation? Where is the Auditor General’s finding that GoldBod lost GH¢22 billion?” the institute asked.
“Where is the accounting entry showing that this amount is a liability or trading loss attributable to GoldBod?”
The challenge draws a sharp line between political criticism and audited financial attribution. If critics believe the GH¢22 billion should properly sit on GoldBod’s books, IFPG argues that they must demonstrate the accounting treatment, underlying transactions and institutional responsibility that justify doing so.
The debate has also shifted towards the quality of GoldBod’s reported surplus.
IFPG addressed the GH¢4.5477 billion in grants included in the institution’s 2025 revenue, arguing that the amount had been explicitly provided for in the national budget and reflected in the Appropriation Act rather than introduced later to conceal operational losses.
“The GH¢4.5477 billion allocation to Ghana GoldBod was expressly provided for in the 2025 national budget and subsequently reflected in the Appropriation Act, 2025,” it said. “It was therefore a publicly appropriated amount, not a hidden accounting device discovered after the fact.”
That clarification does not end the underlying economic debate. An audited surplus is an accounting fact, but analysts assessing commercial performance may still distinguish between internally generated revenue and fiscal transfers received from government.
GoldBod has separately said it generated an operational surplus of GH¢909.7 million and an overall surplus of GH¢5.44 billion for 2025. The distinction between those two numbers may prove increasingly important as the political argument shifts from whether the institution technically recorded a profit to how much of that performance came from operations rather than public funding.
For IFPG, the proper response is fuller disclosure rather than the loose reassignment of losses between institutions. It said GoldBod should still answer legitimate questions about pricing, counterparties, transactions, fees and operational decisions whenever required by law.
“GoldBod must answer legitimate questions about its transactions, pricing arrangements, counterparties, fees and operational decisions whenever required by law,” the institute said. “But scrutiny loses credibility when accounting terminology is used loosely to create a political conclusion that the audited accounts themselves do not establish.”
The controversy therefore exposes a larger weakness in the public debate around Ghana’s gold strategy: institutional accounts may not on their own reveal the full consolidated economics of a policy that spans multiple public-sector entities.
GoldBod’s audited surplus answers the narrow question of how the institution reported its own 2025 performance. It does not necessarily answer whether the Bank of Ghana, government and GoldBod collectively incurred costs greater than the benefits generated by the domestic gold purchasing programme.
Likewise, losses recognised by the central bank do not automatically become GoldBod losses simply because the gold agency performs important functions within the same architecture.
The more useful policy question is therefore whether Ghana can produce a consolidated reconciliation showing the full cost and benefit of the programme across all participating state institutions. Such a framework would need to separate trading margins, fees, grants, financing costs, exchange-rate effects, reserve gains, discounts, operational expenses and any other programme-related items.
Without that reconciliation, the dispute risks remaining trapped between two propositions that can both be true at the same time: GoldBod can have an audited surplus, and the wider domestic gold purchasing architecture can still generate significant economic costs elsewhere in the public sector.
That distinction matters because Ghana’s gold strategy has become increasingly important to foreign-exchange management, reserve accumulation and macroeconomic policy. The larger the programme becomes, the more important it will be for the public to understand not merely the financial position of individual institutions but the consolidated economic effect of the entire framework.
For now, IFPG’s position is unambiguous. The institute says critics have not demonstrated an audited GH¢22 billion loss on GoldBod’s own books and should not present losses associated with the Bank of Ghana’s programme as though they were identical to GoldBod’s institutional performance.
“Political rhetoric cannot convert an audited surplus into an institutional loss,” it said.
The deeper question, however, remains unresolved: whether Ghana’s public sector as a whole is earning or losing money from the domestic gold purchasing architecture once all costs, revenues and balance-sheet effects are brought together. That is the reconciliation likely to determine whether the argument ends as an accounting dispute or develops into a much larger debate over the economic design of Ghana’s gold policy.
