A filling station at Zuarungu in the Upper East Region passed a marker test on August 18, 2023.
Six days later, a consumer reported finding water in the fuel.
The National Petroleum Authority (NPA) subsequently confirmed about 180 litres of water in the station’s underground tank.
That case sits within a performance audit by the Ghana Audit Service, which found weaknesses at several points along the chain designed to follow petroleum products from depot to pump.
Tankers without valid licences were operating. Tens of thousands of deliveries went untracked. About 87 million litres of petrol were distributed in 2025 without being marked. At filling stations, 11 of 23 Automatic Tank Gauging Systems (ATGS) inspected by auditors were not functioning.
The findings do not establish that fuel sold in Ghana is generally contaminated or unsafe.
The Audit Service was careful on that point.
“We are not saying that the products are not good. We are saying that the assurance is not there,” the Audit Service said during a media training on the report in Accra.
The concern is that weaknesses in the regulatory controls mean the NPA cannot provide full assurance that all petroleum products at the pump meet the required quality standards or that all taxes due on those products are collected.
A Deadline, And An Argument
The first link is the tanker.
Only 2,514 of 4,904 registered petrol and diesel Bulk Road Vehicles (BRVs) had valid licences as of April 9, 2026, representing 51.3 percent.
The remaining 2,390 did not have valid licences.
The auditors inspected 25 BRVs at depots and stations in March 2026 and found nine operating with expired licences.
BRV licences expire on December 31, with operators given a grace period until March 31 to renew them.
The audit found that the affected vehicles had not been deactivated in the NPA’s Enterprise Relational Database Management System (ERDMS).
The NPA cited concerns about possible disruption to petroleum supplies as a reason for extending the deadline.
The Audit Service said supply concerns did not remove the licensing requirement and recommended that vehicles whose licences expire and are not renewed within the prescribed period be deactivated from the ERDMS and prevented from loading petroleum products.
The auditors also noted that the NPA checks roadworthiness certificates as part of the licensing process.
Their concern, therefore, was not that every unlicensed tanker had necessarily transported poor-quality fuel. Rather, they said that without a valid licence, there was no assurance that the vehicle remained fit to transport fuel in a manner that protects product quality and public safety.
Trips Nobody Tracked
The next layer is electronic tracking.
Of 1,092,440 petroleum product delivery trips recorded between 2023 and 2025, 48,678 were not tracked.
The number fell from 35,249 in 2023 to 8,099 in 2024 and 5,330 in 2025.
All 25 BRVs inspected by the auditors had working trackers and electronic seals.
But the tracking gap was not limited to individual missed journeys.
Aviation Turbine Kerosene (ATK) and Naphtha were left out of the tracking system because they did not attract a margin under the Unified Petroleum Pricing Fund (UPPF).
The Audit Service said the requirement was to track all petroleum products, regardless of whether they generated a UPPF margin.
The auditors also identified 544 deliveries that were missed in 2023 during the migration from the previous vehicle tracking system to the Electronic Cargo Tracking System.
They further identified 582 diversions in 2024 and 2025 involving about 9.78 million litres of petrol and diesel.
During the training, the Audit Service explained that some diversions could create an economic benefit where a tanker assigned to one zone delivers to another zone and a higher transport cost is subsequently claimed from the UPPF.
The auditors recommended that all petroleum products be tracked and that sanctions be enforced for violations.
Marked, But Not Matched
Petroleum products are marked to help authorities identify fuel that has passed through the required controls.
Between 2023 and 2025, about 15.42 billion litres of petroleum products were marked, against about 15.05 billion litres recorded as distributed.
The difference was approximately 362.6 million litres, or 2.35 percent.
The audit found that the NPA’s Quality Assurance Directorate and the UPPF Secretariat each conducted checks, but neither reconciled the volumes marked against the volumes distributed.
The NPA attributed some of the differences to the way its reports categorised products. The auditors, however, said the NPA did not provide distribution data for the other categories of diesel needed to explain the gap.
Petrol in 2025 presented a different problem.
About 3.011 billion litres were recorded as marked, while 3.099 billion litres were distributed.
That left approximately 87 million litres distributed without being marked.
The Audit Service estimated a loss of GH¢78.6 million to the UPPF in 2025 and also raised the possibility of tax evasion on the unmarked volumes.
The audit further found that US$2,688.09 was paid to Nationwide Technologies Limited for marking 638,500 litres of petrol between 2023 and 2024 that were never distributed.
The auditors also raised concerns that consumers could be exposed to substandard fuel that marker tests would not be able to trace.
The wider problem is that where marked and distributed volumes are not reconciled, there is less certainty about how much product entered the distribution system, where it went and whether the appropriate revenues were collected.
Gauges That Did Not Work
At filling stations, Automatic Tank Gauging Systems are intended to give the regulator information about what is happening inside underground tanks.
By March 2026, 3,443 of a planned 4,000 systems had been installed, leaving 557 outstanding.
Only 1,813 outlets were fully automated. Another 1,630 were partially automated because of issues including missing forecourts, faulty pumps and unreliable power supply.
The audit also noted that about 200 outlets with installed ATGS were inactive at the end of 2024.
The auditors inspected 23 installed systems at sampled outlets and found 11 that were not functioning because of breakdowns, power-related damage and poor configuration.
The audit also raised questions about maintenance.
The NPA paid Rock Automation Solutions Limited (RASL) GH¢648.62 million between January 2023 and May 2026 for the installation, operation and maintenance of the ATGS.
The payments were made in lump sums and, according to the Audit Service, were not sufficiently broken down to establish how much related to installation, operation or maintenance.
The auditors found no evidence that maintenance activities had been verified before payment and said broken components had not been repaired.
Planned monitoring visits also declined.
The NPA conducted 87,944 of 88,678 planned monitoring visits between 2023 and 2025. Over the period, the number of planned visits fell by 19.8 percent while the number of licensed outlets increased by 1.3 percent.
What Happened At The Pumps
The auditors documented cases that illustrate the difficulties created by weaknesses in the monitoring system.
At Zuarungu in the Upper East Region, the station passed a marker test on August 18, 2023. Six days later, a consumer reported finding water in the fuel, and NPA documentation confirmed approximately 180 litres of water in the underground tank.
At Kanvill in Tamale, water was reported in a diesel tank after about 36,000 litres had already been sold.
Because the fuel had already been dispensed, a marker test could no longer be conducted on the product. According to the Audit Service presentation, the station manager compensated affected consumers.
At Fijai and Nkroful in the Western Region, a driver’s engine failed in April 2025 after purchasing products from the two outlets. The products at both stations subsequently failed marker tests.
The audit does not establish that the fuel caused the vehicle’s engine failure.
Nor do these cases establish that fuel sold at the stations was generally contaminated.
They instead illustrate the practical difficulty of assuring fuel quality when some of the systems intended to monitor petroleum products are incomplete or not functioning.
Questions Beyond The Audit
The findings also prompted broader questions from the Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP).
ACEP Policy Lead for Petroleum and Conventional Energy, Kodzo Yaotse, called for closer scrutiny of petroleum-sector funds, margins and contracts, including the ATGS arrangement.
Yaotse said the NPA reportedly planned to address the non-functioning ATGS by June 2027 and questioned why the remediation could not begin immediately.
He also questioned whether payments to the contractor were continuing.
Yaotse raised corruption risks associated with weaknesses identified in the regulatory and financial systems.
He was careful, however, to distinguish those risks from an established finding of corruption.
He said there was no finding at that stage that corrupt action was taking place, but argued that some of the weaknesses created openings that could potentially be abused and therefore presented corruption risks.
The distinction is important because the Audit Service’s findings concern regulatory and control weaknesses rather than an established finding that the NPA or its officials engaged in corruption.
A Special Audit With A Wider Follow-Up
The Audit Service said the exercise was a special audit and that the actual audit work took about two months, compared with roughly nine months for a typical performance audit, including its preliminary study.
The auditors said the shorter timeframe meant the exercise was focused on selected risk areas identified during the preliminary assessment.
They also indicated that some issues, including procurement-related concerns, could require further audit work.
The report itself contains recommendations aimed at tightening the controls around petroleum transportation, tracking, product marking and retail monitoring.
What Happens Next
The Audit Service said the report would go through Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee.
After the committee’s consideration and recommendations, the Audit Service said it would follow up on implementation.
The recommendations include enforcing tanker licensing, tracking all petroleum products, reconciling marked and distributed volumes, completing and repairing ATGS installations and verifying maintenance before payments are made.
For a system built to follow petroleum products from depot to pump, the audit’s concern is ultimately about whether those safeguards provide the assurance they were designed to provide.
The Audit Service’s conclusion is that, despite the regulatory work being carried out by the NPA, gaps in licensing, tracking, marking and monitoring mean there is no assurance that all fuel at the pump meets the required quality standards or that all taxes due are collected.
