PAC to deal with Auditor General’s Report in October

Aug 18, 2008 News

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–    PNCR’s Volda Lawrence

Head of the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC), PNCR’s Member of Parliament Ms Volda Lawrence, says that the Auditor General’s 2006 Report will be dealt with after the National Assembly comes out of recess in October.
Yesterday, this newspaper sought to obtain from Lawrence a preliminary comparison of this year’s report with the previous one.
The PAC is the agency which is tasked with scrutinizing the yearly reports. However, Lawrence said that she was unable to offer a preliminary comparison with the 2005 report, given that she has not read the 2006 Auditor General’s Report.
The Auditor General’s Report was handed over to the Speaker of the National Assembly on July 30, and was made public a week later.
Despite the fact that the Auditor General’s Report for Guyana came in one year late, it has proved to be very revealing.
The report on the audited public accounts of Guyana and on the accounts of ministries, departments and regions for the year ended December 31, 2006 has apparently verified a complaint of the Parliamentary opposition parties that the Contingencies Fund has been abused.
According to the report, presented to the National Assembly by the Auditor General, the Contingencies Fund continued to be abused, with amounts drawn from the fund being utilised to meet expenditure that did not meet the eligibility criteria as defined in the Act. “According to the Statement, amounts totalling $3.945 billion were drawn from the fund by way of 138 advances….As at 31 December 2006, forty-nine of these advances, totalling $1.721 billion, remained outstanding.”
Another issue that was raised in the report was the fact that GPHC, which is now a separate entity from the Ministry of Health, continued to use the ministry’s Cabinet approval (funds) to purchase drugs and medical supplies from specialised agencies, both local and overseas.
“It did not re-tender or obtain a new no-objection from Cabinet for the purchase of drugs and medical supplies…Further, during 2006, amounts totalling $608.406M were expended on drugs and medical supplies…However, the Corporation could not totally account for drugs and medical supplies purchased, since there was no central point of accountability.”
In relation to Customs & Trade Administration, the Auditor General noted seventeen Permits for Immediate Delivery (PID), with a total value of $2.832 billion, had not yet been perfected at the time of the audit in January 2007.
Incoming vessels at ports in Guyana totalled 1,089. However, completed ships’ files in respect of 243 ships were not submitted to the Quality Review Section, and as such were not made available for audit examination.
In relation to the Ministry of Home Affairs, it was noted that a quantity of arms and ammunition, to the value of $11.160M, which were paid for in 2003, have not yet been delivered, nor has the ministry been able to recover the amount paid.
It was also noted in the report that several ministries and departments also recorded overstatements on their appropriation accounts, and the unspent amounts have not been refunded, “…Subvention agencies not returning the unspent portions of amounts paid over to them for specific expenditure.”
The Auditor General also cited in his report what he called the overpayment of contracts. “Several ministries and regions have not recovered amounts overpaid on various contracts in prior periods….In addition, some of these ministries and regions, such as Education, Amerindian Affairs, Regions Two, Three, Six, Seven and 10, continued to have overpayments on various contracts during 2006…One such example was recorded under the Ministry of Education, where $10.982M was overpaid on eleven projects which were mainly for the rehabilitation and extension to schools.”
Finance Minister Ashni Singh, in a recent interview with this newspaper, said that it was regrettable that, in some instances, the Auditor General’s Report did not in every case reflect the explanations that would have been proffered by the various Government ministries and departments.
The Auditor General is required by law to have included in the report explanations for issues that raised an eyebrow with him.
This was done in some cases where the Auditor General’s Report reflects some of the explanations, but in others this was not done.
“I would say that, in the overwhelming majority of instances, the issues that have been reported by the Auditor General have explanations that in many cases would have been offered by the respective Government ministries and departments.”
The Finance Minister also stated that what was also regrettable was that some of the issues were being highlighted sensationally in the media, when in fact if one were to understand and examine them properly, one would see that there is no question of impropriety at all.
“Rather, there would be very plausible explanations.”
He noted that, in the absence of these explanations in the report, the head of the various budget agencies would be required to appear before the Public Accounts Committee, which is a Parliamentary committee that scrutinizes the report and its findings.
One of the minister’s recommendations for reports in future would be for it to include, to a greater extent, the responses and explanations that are provided by the respective agencies.
This newspaper was reliably informed that one of the reasons for the lack of explanations in various instances was the fact that the Audit Office was severely understaffed, resulting in a lot of the explanations not being processed fully.
When the report was presented to the National Assembly, Auditor General Deodat Sharma had stated that the delay, which was close to a year, was due to the lack of adequate resources.
–    The Auditor General, at that time, had called for the report to be debated in the National Assembly as early as possible.

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