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That Auditor General’s Report
The issue of the Auditor General’s Report is slowly being cleared up. Many people do not readily understand that some of the findings have nothing to do with actual cash. Some of the headlines screamed that billions of dollars had gone missing.
Such headlines would make for good reading, but they mislead the public; they tell a story that is far from the truth. It is the same with the stories about improprieties and irregularities.
There are explanations for many of the comments by the Auditor General, and the various monitoring bodies actually seek answers.
Further, there is a Parliamentary body that demands answers to the various queries raised by the Auditor General. This Parliamentary body is headed by a member of the opposition.
At present, that Parliamentary body, the Public Accounts Committee, is demanding answers to the issues raised in the Auditor General’s Report for fiscal year 2005. This body invites the various Permanent Secretaries and heads of departments and asks them questions.
This body has been in place for a long time, and at no time has there been any recommendation for prosecutions, except when there were glaring irregularities.
There have been cases when the Government moved to prosecute people, but more often than not, the authorities would find it difficult to secure evidence that would sustain a conviction.
There is another aspect of the scrutiny of financial transactions that has been eluding those who seek to make sensational headlines of the Auditor General’s Reports.
In 2004, the Government introduced a system called the Integrated Financial Management and Accounting Systems (IFMAS).
Every transaction is recorded by IFMAS, and could be seen at any time by the Auditor General or whoever is monitoring the expenditures and other monetary transactions.
If there are irregularities, then IFMAS would pick them up almost instantly, and the auditors would not have to wait until the end of the year. Every transaction is recorded and monitored.
It is for this reason that the report by the Auditor General deals almost exclusively with methods of transactions rather than with the contents of the transactions.
But, without a doubt, the report is a guide for the Government, and the Government has actually heeded the recommendations.
But when it comes to the irregularities, there are times when some transactions may be needed in a hurry and there cannot be waiting on the various determinations by the recommended bodies.
This is why, in the Auditor General’s Report, there are so many queries about procedures, and these should not be issues for which one could blame the Government.
The need to have some projects executed in a hurry, for example as was the case of the bridge at New Providence, no administration could have gone through the various procedures, including advertising for tenders and the like. There had to be selective tendering.
The report also queried a matter of ship repairs. There are two dry docking facilities. This begged for selective tendering, but the Auditor General asked for competitive bidding of three or more entities.
There is also the case of a monetary transaction involving the Caribbean Multilateral Clearing Facility.
Guyana, one of the founders of this facility, had loan payments, and in the end ended up owing the CMCF a lot of money. This indebtedness was cleared when Guyana enjoyed a debt write-off.
The Auditor then found that the money which should have accrued was on the books but this was money that was never there in the first place.
Anyone reading the report would conclude that this was missing money instead of understanding that it was a paper transaction. Such situations can easily be explained, but many of these explanations are not contained in the report.
The Auditor General is bound by law to include all the explanations submitted to him. However, this was not the case this time around, and there may be a reason for this.
The most likely reason may be the shortage of staff; and until this is corrected, then future reports would be poorly written and cause inexperienced people looking at them to arrive at erroneous conclusions.
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