A Mid-Year Report is a report card not an audit

Sep 24, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

---

(Kaieteur News) – Christopher Ram is right to demand accountability for the spending of public money. He is also right that figures are most useful when they tell a coherent story about what Government has spent, what it has achieved and what remains to be done.

But to ask for all of these things in a Mid-Year Annual Report is to turn that report into something that it was not intended to be. And given the statutory timelines, it is doubtful that the deadline set in law would be met if Ram’s requirements were to be met.

The Mid-Year Report is a statutory document required by section 67 of the Fiscal Management and Accountability Act 2003. The Act requires the Minister, within sixty days after the end of the first half of the fiscal year, to present to the National Assembly a report on the year-to-date execution of the annual budget and the prospects for the remainder of that fiscal year.

In other words, the Mid-Year Report is essentially a report card. It tells Parliament how the Government is performing against the budget approved for the year, what has changed since the Budget was presented, what the economic and fiscal outlook now looks like, and what risks or adjustments may confront the Government during the remaining months.

Section 67(2) sets out the architecture of that report. It requires an update on the macroeconomic and fiscal situation, including a revised economic outlook and the implications for the annual budget. It requires a comparison of actual current and capital expenditure and revenues with the estimates approved by the National Assembly, together with explanations of significant variances. And it requires a list of major fiscal risks for the remainder of the year and the policy responses Government proposes to address them.

Those requirements are important because they tell us what Parliament intended the Mid-Year Report to accomplish. Against that statutory purpose, some of the additional information suggested by Ram would undoubtedly be useful. It would be helpful, for example, to know expenditure by programme and, where appropriate, by major project. It would be useful to know the cost of completed works, expenditure to date on unfinished works, physical progress against expenditure, significant variations from original project estimates and, ultimately, enough information to enable an assessment of value for money.

But what Ram wants is not a statutory requirement. If every one of Ram’s requirements were incorporated into the Mid-Year Report for every Government programme, the document could quickly become extraordinarily voluminous and cumbersome. A housing programme alone may contain numerous developments, each involving land acquisition, roads, drainage, utilities, street lighting, community facilities, houses, lots and other infrastructure. Multiply that across every ministry and agency and the Mid-Year Report could cease to be a report card on the national budget and become a vast compilation of project-management reports.

That is not necessarily better accountability.  More information is not automatically more useful information. Good public financial reporting is about presenting the right information at the right level, in a form that allows Parliament and the public to understand the fiscal position and to identify significant deviations from what was approved.

There is also a difference between budget execution and project auditing. The Mid-Year Report can properly tell Parliament that a particular sector has received and spent a particular amount against its approved allocation and explain significant deviations. That does not mean the report must become the principal document for determining whether every road was constructed at the optimum cost, whether every housing development is at the precise stage claimed, or whether each individual project represents value for money.

Those are legitimate questions, but they can and should be pursued through the Report of the Auditor General or through a process of demanding annual reports of the various Ministries, agencies, public corporations and agencies.

This does not mean that the Government should hide behind the statutory minimum. The law establishes a floor, not necessarily a ceiling, for transparency. Where a very large expenditure requires additional explanation to make the figures intelligible, Government should provide it. And where there are significant variances, section 67 expressly requires explanations.

The sensible debate, therefore, is not whether Ram’s appetite for information is legitimate. It is whether every item on his wish list belongs in the Mid-Year Report itself. The answer should be no.

A good Mid-Year Report should allow Parliament to answer the fundamental questions: Where are we financially? How much of the approved budget has been executed? How does actual performance compare with what Parliament authorised? Why are there significant deviations? What has changed in the economic outlook? What risks lie ahead? And what is Government doing about them?

Those are the questions section 67 places at the centre of the exercise.

The Mid-Year Report should therefore be judged principally by whether it fulfils that purpose. It should be clear, credible and sufficiently detailed to permit meaningful parliamentary scrutiny. But it should not be transformed into an unwieldy catalogue of every project, contract, expenditure item and physical output undertaken by Government during the first six months of the year.

The challenge is not to put every conceivable number into one document. It is to ensure that the right information appears in the right document, at the right level of detail, and that together those documents provide Parliament and the public with a complete picture of how public money is being managed.

That is a much more useful standard by which to judge the Mid-Year Report.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)                       

---

• Christopher Ram, Mid-Year Report, Peeping Tom, report card

---