Federal and regional authorities have spent months urging taxpayers to pay more into the treasury and brace for slimmer subsidies. Last week, in a closed Parliamentary session, the Federal Auditor General, Meseret Damtie, held that message up to a harder mirror.

Meseret's audit covered 183 federal agencies, and a budget of 1.5 trillion Br Parliament appropriated for the current fiscal year. The verdict was that weak controls remain embedded across much of the federal administration, even as senior officials often speak about the proper use of public funds.

Officials insist that budgets should be used properly; a federal oversight institution documented a different record inside the same government, at the very moment the state is collecting large sums to fund itself and pare back subsidies, a moment that makes the cost of weak controls harder to defend. The Auditor General and her team sorted the findings into deficits, unsupported spending, irregular procurement, overpayments, unreturned balances and weak use of appropriations. Taken together, the entries traced a system in which audit observations repeat, and recoveries lag behind orders to pay the money back. The amounts varied from one office to the next, but the pattern held.

The first gap was revenue that never arrived. More than 16 billion Br should have been collected but was not, resulting in a shortfall spread across 138 agencies. It was made up of uncollected revenues, unpaid dues and money offices were required to settle and alongside it sat large balances parked in institutional accounts that should have been returned to the Ministry of Finance (MoF).

Then came spending no paper could explain. More than 1.2 billion Br was left in government accounts without evidence or with too little of it. About 3pc carried no evidence at all, while the rest had inadequate documentation. The Ministry of Health, under Mekdes Daba (MD), ministry of Mines under Habtamu Tegegn; and the Ministry of  Foreign Affairs under Gedion Timotheos (PhD)  , were named among the main institutions where it surfaced.

Meseret pressed federal legislators not to file the cases away.

“We've urged for it to be investigated and appropriate measures to be taken,” she told Parliament on Thursday, June 18, 2026.

Not every audited agency accepted her framing. According to Alemshet Teshome, director for public and international relations at Haramaya University, the outstanding funds were in the form of project and goods advances, with construction and procurement still pending and final payments unsettled.

"The University was working to finalise payments and address the findings," he said.

Meseret's audit also found that salaries were still being paid to people who had left, through retirement, death, or dismissal. Sixteen institutions paid more than one million Birr to employees no longer at work, far below the 40 million Br reported a year earlier, an improvement that did not erase the practice. The Ethiopian Sports Academy, as well as universities in Ambo, Addis Abeba and Gambella, were cited, as was ALERT Comprehensive Specialised Hospital. Its CEO for Competence & Human Resources Management & Development, Tesfaye Gudeta, accepted the finding but blamed the circumstances. He argued that the lapse was "procedural," not a matter of keeping the employees on.

“This came because when doctors at the specialist level retire, we give them contracts and make them work since they're difficult to replace," he said. “That is what was reported against us as 'paid to departed employees'. Our fault is not notifying the Civil Service Commission.”

Procurement supplied the next layer, where 18 agencies bought goods worth more than 57 million Br without following the rules, around six million Birr more than the previous year. Universities like Bahir Dar, Haromaya, and the Maritime Authority are the top three. Seventeen public institutions paid twice or overpaid, a figure exceeding 280 million Br and more than six times the previous year. The Ministry of Health, the Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation (EBC) and the Ethiopian Sports Academy led the tally.