Former Auditor General Anand Goolsarran says that the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament (PAC) needs to begin immediately examining the latest Auditor General’s report and have a sub-committee tackle the backlog years.
In his accountability column in yesterday’s Kiskadee Watch, Goolsarran said the “new PAC needs to adopt a different approach to its scrutiny of the public accounts in order to close the gap and bring its work up-to-date. As we (his Auditor General’s office) did in the case of the ten-year backlog in financial reporting and audit of the public accounts covering the period 1981 to 1991, the Committee may wish to adopt a similar two-pronged approach. This involves the full nine-member PAC examining the 2024 audited public accounts, that is, the latest available accounts, while a five-member sub-committee deals with the backlogged years 2019-2023”.
The rationale for this approach, he said, is that based on historic trends, it took more than a year for the PAC to complete its examination of one year’s public accounts.
“This means that if the Committee adopts a sequential approach, as it did in the past, the PAC’s scrutiny of the public accounts will continue to be in arrears by five to six years”, he contended. Additionally, rather than going through the report paragraph by paragraph, Goolsarran said that the PAC should consider examining issues across Ministries, Departments and Regions.
“A convenient starting point is the executive summary of the Auditor General’s report which highlights several major issues such as overpayments to contractors; breaches in the Procurement Act; short-supply of drugs and medical supplies; overdraft on the Consolidated Fund; failure to pay over unspent balances to the Consolidated Fund; and keeping cash books open beyond the stipulated time and drawing cheques and backdating them to exhaust budgetary allocations”, Goolsarran stated.
The former Auditor General also expressed concern at the government’s proclivity to naming sitting ministers to the PAC. Ministers are sitting on the committee even though with its 36 to 29 majority in Parliament the PPP/C has many other MPs they can place on the PAC.
Goolsarran adverted to the undesirability of sitting Ministers serving on the Committee because of possible conflict of interest, especially when the PAC scrutinizes the accounts of the Ministries and Departments for which they are subject Ministers.
“The Auditor General would also be hard-pressed to be as critical as he would like to be of a Ministry or Department, knowing full well that the subject Minister is on the Committee. We have not been able to find any jurisdiction under the Westminster system of government where a sitting Minister is a member of the PAC, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and the English-speaking Caribbean. The Assembly’s Committee of Selection should therefore review its recommendation for the two concerned Ministers sit to be on the Committee, also considering their portfolios as Ministers are such that they may not be able to devote the required amount of time as regards the work of the PAC”.
The PAC is chaired by an opposition member of Parliament in this case by Vishnu Panday of We Invest in Nationhood. Since it entered office again in 2020, the PPP/C has been accused of hobbling the work of the committee by passing an amendment to its quorum rules. Two MPs representing the government must be present for a meeting to be quorate. Dozens of meetings were cancelled during the last Parliament because of the regular absences of PPP/C MPs.
The members of the PAC are, for the PPP/C: Juan Edghill – Minister of Public Works, Gail Teixeira – Minister of Governance and Parliamentary Affairs, Vishwa Mahadeo – Deputy Speaker, Suresh Singh and Sanjeev Datadin; for the WIN party: Vishnu Panday- Chairperson and Nandranie Singh; and for APNU: Juretha Fernandes and Ganesh Mahipaul.
With five PPP/C MPs on the committee there will be great interest in whether meetings have to be cancelled because four of them are absent at any one time.
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