Not nearly enough public attention is paid to the Auditor General’s Report. If the reverse were true the government would have had to deal with a much more robust public demand that the abysmal standards of accountability that attend the management of the public purse be addressed and that those responsible for what, frequently, is the ill-explained disappearance of public monies be brought to account.
Criticisms of the document apart, the Auditor General’s Report is a pretty insightful document insofar as it proffers, among other things, a pretty reasonable idea of the sense of probity and responsibility applied by the government in the management of the public purse.
On the whole, the Auditor General does not appear to think much about the level of official responsibility that is applied in the spending of public monies. In most years it has said so unequivocally. Each year, without fail, the Auditor General’s Report points to numerous instances of reckless administration of hundreds of millions of dollars of public funds. In addition, the details of some of the transactions spelt out in the Auditor General’s Report point unerringly in the direction of corrupt practices. The repetitive nature of these occurrences and the sheer sums of funds involved are not matched by the level of diligence associated with efforts either to recoup the missing monies or to hold those responsible for the disappearance accountable.
Those persons whose knowledge of the rules and procedures associated with the management of the public purse are likely to find the Auditor General’s report interesting if only because it is, in large measure, a pretty readable document and that, in parts, it employs language which leaves little to the imagination as to what it intends to say. This newspaper has, in the past, advocated that it would do us a power of good if, for example, sections of the report were to be even further simplified and made available to the public and here we speak about those sections that address the sheer scale of the misappropriation/disappearance of public funds and the instances of what appears like naked fraud.
We have seen some ‘gems’ that have been uncovered in previous AG’s reports like the one about the bogus company with an address in a municipal market that was transacting millions of dollars in business with a particular regional administration and the submission to the auditors of bills for repairs to a piece of government equipment that had never been used. There are more such ‘gems’ in this year’s report: like “overpayments to contractors” recruited to work for the state. Setting aside the fact of the overpayments, it is the staggering sums involved that are alarming. The Auditor General’s Report for 2011 makes reference to three separate sums—$22.8634 million, $33.247 million and $13.247 million—which represent overpayments to private contractors in Region One, an occurrence which the report describes as “a continued trend.” And while the report provides no details on how overpayments in these enormous sums could have occurred it frowns on the fact that there is “no evidence to suggest the disciplinary action of any kind has been meted out to engineering or other staff involved in the assessment of the works in progress and the certification of progress payments.” This, it says, “hints at management’s perceived inaction to remedy the current situation.”
Comments of a similar nature a echoed elsewhere in the Auditor General’s Report and what these comments point to is an unambiguous criticism of those public sector managers and perhaps even ministers whose job it is to help superintend the management of the public purse but under whose watch there continues to be a relentless haemorrhaging of sums of monies which the authorities do not appear to bother about in the least.
