By MAKKINN NEWS
The Right to Information Commission has imposed administrative penalties of GH¢20,000 each on 254 public institutions, including Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) and Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs), for failing to submit their 2025 RTI Annual Reports as required by law. The Commission announced the sanctions in a press release issued on Wednesday, August 5, 2026, citing Section 77(1) of the Right to Information Act, 2019 (Act 989), which obligates every public institution to report annually on its implementation of the law.
Who Was Fined
The list of defaulting institutions spans nearly every corner of the public sector. Major teaching hospitals, including Korle-Bu, Komfo Anokye, and 37 Military Hospital, appear alongside the Ghana Police Service, the Ghana Armed Forces, and the Bureau of National Intelligence. Regulatory and revenue-generating bodies were also cited, among them the National Petroleum Authority, the Office of the Special Prosecutor, the Minerals Commission, and Ghana Grid Company Limited. State enterprises such as Ghana Railway Company, Tema Oil Refinery, Volta Aluminium Company, and Metro Mass Transit were named, as were public universities including the University of Ghana and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, along with UPSA and the University of Professional Studies.
Why the Penalties Were Imposed
According to the Commission, the affected institutions failed to comply despite repeated reminders published in the Ghanaian Times on January 20, 2026, and the Daily Graphic on April 24, 2026. The Commission said annual reports from individual institutions are essential inputs for its own consolidated report to Parliament on how the RTI law is being implemented nationwide, meaning the defaults have a knock-on effect on the Commission's ability to account to the legislature. Affected institutions have been directed to settle their penalties within 14 days of receiving official notice, and the Commission reiterated that compliance with Act 989's reporting requirement is a legal obligation rather than a discretionary courtesy.
Part of a Wider Enforcement Pattern
Wednesday's mass sanction is the latest in a string of RTI Commission enforcement actions in 2026, several of them larger in scale than routine reporting fines. In April, the Commission fined the Ministry of Finance GH¢100,000 for refusing to release information on emoluments paid to former government appointees between January 2021 and January 2025, after the Ministry claimed the information was not in its custody, a defence the Commission rejected as falling outside the law's exemption categories. In January, the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO) was fined a similar GH¢100,000 after failing to release requested information and ignoring the Commission's directives to submit it for review. The National Service Authority was separately fined more than GH¢159,000, including accumulated interest charged at 10 percent every 14 days, after stalling for over a year on a request from investigative outlet The Fourth Estate for national service posting data.
Commission figures show the scale of the compliance problem stretches back years: between 2020 and July 2025, penalties totalling about GH¢5.6 million were imposed across 76 determinations involving 64 institutions. Of that amount, 36 institutions still owe roughly GH¢2.15 million in unpaid penalties, while 23 institutions have paid a combined GH¢3.5 million, funds that come from public coffers rather than the pockets of the officials responsible for the refusals.
A Personal-Liability Proposal Is Now on the Table
That detail, that fines are currently paid from public funds even when the fault lies with an individual officer's refusal to act, has prompted a new proposal reported this year: surcharging the specific public officers who block RTI requests, so that penalties come out of personal resources rather than the institution's budget. If adopted, the change would mark a significant shift in how accountability is enforced under Act 989, moving the cost of non-compliance from taxpayers to the individuals responsible for it.
The Bigger Picture
Taken together, Wednesday's 254 sanctions and the year's earlier six-figure penalties point to an RTI Commission increasingly willing to enforce Act 989 against institutions of every size and rank, from teaching hospitals to the Ministry of Finance. Whether that enforcement translates into faster, more complete information releases for journalists, researchers, and citizens will likely on whether the personal-liability proposal moves forward, and whether the growing list of unpaid penalties, still nearly GH¢2.15 million as of mid-2025, is ever actually recovered.


Source: MAKKINN NEWS