The recently released Auditor General’s Report for 2009 reads – as it customarily does like a corruption catalogue. No other public document comes even remotely close to documenting the irregularities, ranging from the manipulation and/or abandonment of laid down procedures to downright and unmistakable fraud. The government led the charge in 2009. The Contingency Fund, the Auditor General said, was “abused” by the government. There is a chilling bluntness to his choice of language. The Auditor General, one assumes, would be mindful of his choice of words in seeking to describe the behaviour of the political administration in matters of financial propriety. The word “abused” was deliberate. The extent of the abuse was somewhere in the region of $2 billion.
The Auditor General’s Report should be essential reading for every Guyanese. It is not – as some might imagine – a thoroughly technical document. It is written in a manner that allows for any intelligent person to get the gist of what it says and to gain an insight into the sheer scale of the corrupt practices in the public sector. It speaks for example of bogus bills and fraudulent invoices and companies that are no more than shells, set up to enable the siphoning of monies mostly through procurement contracts. The Auditor General’s Report speaks too of the shenanigans that go on at the level of the various ministerial tender boards like in the case of the Ministry of Education where the minutes of an entire Tender Board meeting were simply invented and another in which an individual was recorded as having been part of a quorum for a meeting of the Tender Board at a time when he was not even a member of the Board.
Then there are these strange overpayments to private contractors some of which occurred several years ago. Many, perhaps most of those overpaid amounts will probably never be repaid. There are stores irregularities too, which allow for the disappearance of millions of dollars worth of state property; like the case of the disappearance in Region Four of more than 2000 litres of gasoline. Then there are the fictitious quotations tendered in support of expenditure for the hiring of boats in cases where, it seems, the boats may probably never have been hired in the first place, It may simply have been an elaborate ruse to get money out of the system.
Some of the cases of impropriety documented in the Auditor General’s Report would have been amusing were they not so disturbing like the case in 2000 of a contractor receiving more than $2m as part payment from the Ministry of Education for the production of two television features but never being required to refund the advance after the exercise was cancelled and another in which some of the monies allocated for the provision of security services at a state school were used to issue a loan to a former Headmaster; there is, too, the case of $18.470m worth of Tec Voc equipment that is yet to be delivered to the Ministry of Education two years after the supplier was paid in full.
Whole sections of the Auditor General constitute a veritable chronicle of the “runnings,” collusion between state sector functionaries and private operators to siphon off millions of dollars in kickback rackets. Nothing else comes close to doing the deep throat job that the Auditor General’s Report does.
Equally amazing are the deadpan discourses between the AG’s office and the delinquent departments like the case of the missing GRA files pertaining to the seizure of goods, an occurrence to which the Commissioner General simply responds that “efforts are being made to locate the outstanding files and present them for audit and the Audit Office, in turn, dutifully advising that the GRA take “urgent measures” to find the files.
It is the same pattern from one year to the next. Old discrepancies are simply restated in the reports of the succeeding years and every year new atrocities occur and are dutifully chronicled besides those of the preceding years. Promises to remedy anomalies (some of which simply cannot be amended) are repeated by the offending state agencies and Parliament has a field day, an exercise in self-righteous, ritualistic name-calling. Nothing changes. The culpable, in the overwhelming majority of cases have little if anything to answer for and in the fullness of time things simply fade away until the next Report surfaces with its predictable catalogue of corruption.
