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are appointed by the Minister of Finance for two to three year terms. PIAC is mandated to monitor
and evaluate compliance with Ghana’s Petroleum Revenue Management Act, to provide a platform
for public debate on whether revenues are being used to advance development priorities and to
provide an independent assessment of the management and use of the petroleum revenues. The
PIAC has already demonstrated effectiveness towards good mineral management - in 2011, it found
an unpaid surface rental bill from a major oil field, pressuring government to act (Bauer 2014a).
A third pertinent example is Chad’s oil revenue oversight mechanism. The Collège de Contrôle et de
Surveillance des Ressources Pétrolières (the Collège), is a multistakeholder oversight committee for
Chad’s oil wealth (Gary & Reisch 2005). It approves disbursements from Chad’s fund and oversees
the management and use of revenues from the Chad-Cameroon pipeline. The Collège is a nine
person joint government-civil society body established to monitor the use of Chad’s oil revenues.
Supported by four technical staff, it has the authority to exert its control by verifying the alignment
between production volumes and deposits into the Chadian accounts, by ensuring that revenues are
allocated according to the law, and by participating in the preparation of budgets for expenditures of
petroleum revenues. The Collège has leveraged important pressure on government; for example, in
2005 its report highlighted wells and schools that were paid for but not completed. The Collège has
successfully attracted attention to mismanagement of public funds, pressuring government to
address these issues (Gary & Reisch 2005).
Lessons from Other Oversight Bodies for the NWT
Concerns have been expressed in the NWT that an oversight board would be expensive to operate,
that it would be difficult to find qualified members to sit on the board, and that there is a risk of
political patronage appointments from the Legislative Assembly. In this regard, Chad provides a
strong model for the NWT, wherein for their Collège oversight committee, hiring technical staff
helped to offset the knowledge losses that occurred as trained members rotated out, every two years.
The NWT may want to consider hiring supervisory council support staff, such as an economist or a
tax expert, similar to staff hired to support Chad’s Collège. Training by outside organizations
provided for supervisory council members was important for both Chad and Ghana. Organizations
such as the Natural Resource Governance Institute and the World Bank offer training to increase
effectiveness for newly formed fund oversight groups in developing countries. Ghana’s fund
provides a useful model to avoid political patronage appointments, whereby specific organizations
and groups are identified for representation and selections must come from these designated groups.
Independent oversight from government provides assurances of integrity that internal controls alone
cannot provide. Nearly all of the world’s top rated natural resource wealth funds, including Alaska,
Chile, Ghana, and Norway, have independent oversight. Funds that have been noted to not serve
citizen interests as effectively, such as Libya, Equatorial Guinea, and Qatar, do not have independent
oversight. To illustrate, the Libyan Investment Authority lost much of a $1.2 billion dollars
investment in equity and currency derivatives following the 2008 financial crisis, partly the result of a
lack of independent oversight (Bauer 2014a). In the NWT, the financial stakes are much smaller.
However, for the government and citizens, it is an opportune time to carefully consider which
A Question of Future Prosperity