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Contractors handed over $1B in overpayment in 2024
– APNU warns of fraud and weak oversight
(Kaieteur News) – The 2025 Auditor General’s Report has uncovered more than $1B in overpayments to contractors, exposing serious weaknesses in government oversight, procurement systems and financial management, according to APNU Member of Parliament Dr. Terrence Campbell.
Speaking during his party’s press conference, Campbell explained that the report revealed several significant weaknesses in economic management, record keeping, procurement, oversight and accountability. It also highlighted several cases of missing documents, overpayments, poor controls, non-compliance with regulations, and transactions which had no explanation, he said.
APNU, MP, Dr. Terrence Campbell
According to Campbell, this represents an elevated risk of fraud, corruption, mismanagement and waste.
“The auditors found overpayments totaling G$1.011B across 86 contracts administered by ministries and regions. These overpayments occurred on measured works where contractors received more money than the value of work completed. This amounts to a waste of your taxpayers’ money and less money benefits the people of Guyana,” he said.
Dr. Campbell pointed out that the breakdown shows that in ministries and departments there were overpayments of G$902M across 37 contracts, while in the Regional Democratic Councils it was G$109.99M across 49 contracts. “These are extremely large overpayments and occur because of weak contract supervision, collusion and insufficient verification before payments are handed out,” the APNU front bencher said.
The MP noted that these are opportunities for procurement fraud and corruption which prompted the Auditor General to call for training on common procurement fraud schemes and contract management because of recurring issues in this area.
“Auditors were unable to examine 120 payment vouchers totaling G$877.286M because documents were not available. Major entities involved in withholding documents were the Ministry of Human Services and Social Security: G$693.132M, Region #3: G$127.838M and Region #10: G$56.316M. The report states, “it could not be ascertained whether value was received for the sums involved, and whether the funds were used for the purposes intended,” he added.
Another Member of Parliament for the party Ganesh Mahipaul adding his voice to the discussion explained exactly how the overpayments happen. Explaining that years ago the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) established that it is because of engineers and technical officers sitting in their offices and not venturing out to measure the work completed to see if it matches what the contractor claims before payment is issued.
He noted that according to proper procedures, when a contract is awarded to a contractor or company, as the works progress the engineers should be visiting to measure what was done.
“…so when the contractor receives that first sum…when they receive that advance payment of the mobilisation sum, which should not exceed 15 to 20% of the contract sum, as they progress, the engineer goes and measure and pay for work that is, they’re paid for total measured work. Anytime the auditor general engineers go out and find over payments, it’s because the works were not measured by the engineer, or if it was measured, it was incorrectly measured,” he said.
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