Introduction
Today’s column concludes the review of the Auditor General Report on the audits of the ministries, departments and regions for the year 2010. Readers will recall that the report was delivered to the Speaker of the National Assembly – conveniently for the first time in several years – within the statutory deadline but also conveniently, after the last sitting of the Ninth Parliament so that it could not be tabled and its contents become available to the public prior to the November general and regional elections. Clearly the Speaker of the National Assembly and PPP/C presidential aspirant Mr. Ralph Ramkarran, S.C. did not think it important enough to have a final sitting of the National Assembly for the tabling of the report.
Any reader of the report will be struck by the repetitiveness of the matters reported – and for the more discerning, the matters not addressed – in the report. We get excited at the level of abuse of the Contingencies Fund by the Minister of Finance. But neither the Audit Office nor the Public Accounts Committee appears to have recognised that it was not enough to consider only whether the payments from the Fund met the criteria of “urgent, unavoidable and unforeseen” required before the issuance of a drawing right by the Minister of Finance.
There is no evidence from the report that the Audit Office examined any of the following transactions financed from the Contingencies Fund: the sum of $198 million as a provision for Amerindian development projects; or $7.971 million for
