Government’s no-show stall long-awaited PAC resumption

Jun 25, 2026 News

…Panday slams ‘compromised governance’ amid 6-year audit backlog

(Kaieteur News) – Less than two weeks after its long-overdue formation, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has been stopped dead in its tracks due to the unavailability of government members.

PAC Chairman Vishnu Panday confirmed this week that every single hearing scheduled since the committee’s inception has been cancelled. The reason, each time, was the same: Government members are unavailable. Four meeting dates — Monday June 22, Tuesday June 23, Wednesday June 24, and Friday June 26 — were proposed.

“The Government members’ reluctance to respond positively tells us that the affairs of proper governance are compromised,” Panday warned in a statement issued Wednesday.

Government’s no-show stall long-awaited PAC resumption

MP Vishnu Panday

Following the 2025 general elections, the nine-member parliamentary watchdog took nine months to formally constitute itself, finally electing its members on Monday, June 15, 2026, with Panday — drawn from the main opposition — selected to chair it.

The committee requires a minimum quorum of five members to conduct business: two from the government and three from the combined opposition. The Clerk’s repeated attempts to convene an inaugural session have been met each time with telephone notifications of unavailability from the government benches.

Parliamentary records from the previous term between 2021 and 2025 show that 25 of 51 scheduled PAC meetings were cancelled due to government members being unavailable.

The consequences of this gridlock extend far beyond parliamentary procedure. The PAC carries a constitutional mandate to scrutinise the Auditor General’s Annual Reports, ensuring that public funds are spent as Parliament authorised and that waste and extravagance are held to account.

The committee has only completed its examination of financial records through 2018. Six full fiscal years — 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 — remain entirely unscrutinised. Given that the committee’s meeting frequency allows it to clear only one fiscal year per calendar year, the backlog will not be resolved until 2031. By that point, an entirely new six-year backlog will have formed behind it.

Panday connected the committee’s dysfunction to a broader public matter that has been building around corruption allegations across multiple state ministries. “This attitude surely gives rise to suspicion, since the public cries out frequently on corruption by government officials,” he said.

The contradiction he identified is sharp noting that an administration that publicly champions transparency, accountability, and prudent financial management is the same administration whose elected representatives will not attend the one committee constitutionally empowered to verify those claims.

“I am calling on them to attend all business meetings by fulfilling their obligations to the citizens of this country, who are their paymasters, so that the public affairs of this country can be carried out with efficiency and transparency,” Panday said.

The next scheduled meeting date has not yet been confirmed.

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government members, Public Accounts Committee, Vishnu Panday

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