The wrongs in the public accounts

Jul 13, 2010 Editorial

There is growing acrimony between the decision makers and the examiners of the public accounts. And at the root of all this is the method used to determine how public funds are spent and the extent of accountability.
For some time now the Auditor General, each year, has been producing reports on expenditures by the various Government Ministries and Departments and each report has been highlighting major flaws. The matter does not end there; these reports then go to the National Assembly where a special select committee examines the findings of the report by the Auditor General.
It is here that the problems arise. Harsh words are spoken and accusations fly fast and furious. On the one hand, the Ministers and the Permanent Secretaries would seek to provide explanations for some of the seeming irregularities. They would say that during the audit the Auditor General would be provided with explanations but that somehow, the explanations are not included in the reports.
The various representatives of the Ministries and Departments, when they appear before the Parliamentary Committee, often profess to being unaware of a situation or to having to defer to some higher authority.
There are cases, though, of obvious ineptitude in the Ministries and Departments. Cases of fraud go undetected and there are no explanations to questions about expenditures for which there is no record or no evidence.
Over time, many commentators have had cause to accuse the government of encouraging fraud and corruption because no one is made to pay for the case of disappearing sums of money. There is no prosecution because as the authorities insist, explanations have been provided.
The truth is that there is inadequate supervision of junior clerks, no proper accounting system and certainly no internal penalty for glaring mistakes in accounting.
But there is more. There is the apparent bypass of systems and the failure to provide timely accounts for immediate expenditures. The nation is still to be made aware of the expenditures that followed the floods of 2005, for Cricket World Cup and even for Carifesta 2008. Huge sums were spent with the approval of the Finance Ministry but there is still not the corresponding accounting.
Situations like these cause the onlookers to jump to the conclusion that people are stealing, thus raising the ire of the President Bharrat Jagdeo and Finance Minister, Dr Ashni Singh. They all say that the inspectors and the critics are unreasonable and uninformed. But how can that be when the critics use the information provided by the auditors?
Then there are the cases of money being allocated for projects that never seem to get underway. At present, the Amaila Falls hydro project seems heading for stagnation although there has been a lot of time and energy to source money for the project that would see Guyana being provided with cheap electricity.
It has not escaped notice that Finance Minister Dr Ashni Singh and Head of the Privatisation Unit, Winston Brassington, both became angry at the suggestion that this was a case of money being poorly spent. They said that people had no solid ground on which to base their criticisms.
Time seems to have proven the critics right. The project is stalled and there is no word on the direction it has to go. Meanwhile, money has been released for aspects of the project. Surely the government is going to lose money. And the trend will continue; there would be no explanation of what has been done and how the money would be recovered.
And all this is happening when on the political front there is a call for shared governance. Some of the harshest critics are in the political opposition. Are they going to cut a deal to drop the criticisms of the handling of the economy for political expediency?

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The wrongs in the public accounts

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