Dear Editor,
Please permit me to follow up on my earlier letter which you so kindly published in your July 23 edition. That letter concerned the government’s specious attempt to use Article 218(3) of the Guyana Constitution as a permission to make unauthorized withdrawals from our nation’s Consolidated Fund.
Your readers would most likely be aware that a formal complaint was made to the Guyana Police Force concerning these unauthorized withdrawals. Almost two weeks went by before your newspaper was able to glean from the Crime Chief that the matter is “under examination.” Having seen the police “examine” many matters in the past, I am not reassured by this disclosure, despite the readily available information in this particular case.
Two official documents, already in the public domain are Financial Paper # 1 of 2014 and the Appropriations Act of 2014. Financial Paper # 1 of 2014 provides documentation of public moneys paid out by several budget agencies during a specified period in 2014. The Appropriations Act of 2014 shows that these payments were not appropriated.
Section 32 of the Fiscal Management and Accountability (FMA) Act states clearly that an official shall not make a payment of public moneys except as authorized by a valid drawing right. Section 35 of the same act states “a drawing right shall have no force or effect unless it authorizes the application of public moneys in a manner that is consistent with an appropriation or the purpose of the application as set out in the applicable legislation.” In other words no valid drawing rights could have been issued without legislative authorization and therefore the heads of the various budget agencies involved in paying out moneys that were not appropriated have specifically contravened Section 32 of the FMA Act.
Proper records must be kept by the Finance Secretary for all payments from the Consolidated Fund and would reflect the means used by the Minister of Finance to circumvent Sections 32 and 35 of the FMA Act. The police should be “examining” these records with some amount of urgency since there is every indication that the Minister intends to continue misusing the Consolidated Fund until he is held accountable. The police have been given the opportunity to prove to the Guyanese people that they are capable of impartially investigating white-collar crimes by senior officials, and their actions here will be definitive in this regard. The matter is serious enough to warrant a Commission of Inquiry whenever a proper government is in place and the role of police in protecting the public purse may not be outside the scope of such an inquiry.
All officials involved must be held accountable and a stop must be put to all unlawful withdrawals from the Consolidated Fund if we ever wish to consider ourselves a lawful country again. The people of Guyana cannot be expected to place any value in our laws if these can be so brazenly flouted by the government.
Yours faithfully,
Dominic Gaskin
