The Public Accounts Committee is back in the news again, this time accompanied by a liberal dose of nonsense-speak from Minister of Public Works Juan Edghill. It will be remembered that the PAC is a standing parliamentary committee which is part of the sequence whereby accountability in government spending is ensured. The first stage is undertaken by the Auditor General who then issues a report which is first laid in Parliament and is subsequently scrutinised by the Committee. After reviewing the conclusions and interviewing various officials where this is seen as necessary, it then submits its own report to the National Assembly. The final stage is when the government issues a Treasury Memorandum indicating what action it has taken in response to the PAC’s findings and recommendations.
If there is default at any of these stages then it will not be possible to achieve the desired standard of transparency and accountability which was envisaged when the system was instituted. Notwithstanding Minister Edghill’s utterances to the contrary, the truth of the matter is that the system is not working as it was intended it should. And if the finger of blame for this failure is to point anywhere, it is in the direction of the government.
In April of 2022 the PPP/C used its one-seat majority in the National Assembly to increase the quorum for the Committee from three to five. All the sectoral committees require three persons for a quorum with the exception of the Parliamentary Management Committee, which has five. The new arrangement meant that before a meeting could get under way there had to be two members of the government present as well as two from the opposition, in addition to the Chair who under the rules always comes from the opposition. The Committee comprises nine members in total, five from the government side, and four from the opposition.
However, the increase in the number needed for a quorum has caused such problems in terms of aborted meetings that the opposition has resorted to Parliament to try and pass a motion to reverse the situation. They will not succeed, of course, because the government will use its majority once again to maintain the quorum at five. The question is why.
First, it has to be explained that there is no reason why a quorum of five could not work perfectly well as long as at least two members from each side in addition to the Chair conscientiously attend meetings, but that is not the case. There is no problem with the Chair, Mr Jermaine Figueira, or with securing the presence of two other opposition members; it is the lack of the minimum two government attendees which has caused a whole series of cancellations. And the year 2024 does not appear to be more promising in that regard than was its predecessor.
The opposition explanation for this is that the PAC has only got the length of examining the accounts of 2019, a year when the Coalition was in office, and that the government is attempting to avoid examination of its own accounts after it took over the reins in August 2020. Minister Edghill is insistent that this is not so, and has issued a press release to “set the record straight,” as he described it, going on to remark that it represented another attempt by the opposition to deceive the Guyanese people.
In support of his contention he stated that 2019 was a year when the coalition should have demitted office but refused to do so. It was therefore “abundantly clear,” he said, that APNU+AFC would prefer a situation where three of their members could meet and gloss over the illegalities and maladministration which occurred during that period. With the change in the quorum, the opposition had experienced much “grief and pain” because the 2019-20 period will not disappear. “The spending of public funds in 2020, during the five-month period of attempting to steal an election, is next on the agenda,” he went on to say, “We will see more crocodile tears from the self-righteous.”
This really makes no sense whatever. It doesn’t matter the size of the quorum, if the government members turn up to meetings – and they are in the majority – there can be no glossing over ‘illegalities’; that could only happen if they didn’t turn up to meetings when the quorum was three. And as for the bit of rhetoric about 2020, at the rate the PAC is proceeding, they will not be reaching that year in a hurry.
It might be added that whatever went on in 2019, there was only a fraction of the money splashing around than there is today. Considering that substantial sums come under the purview of Minister Edghill’s own ministry one might have thought he would have shown more impatience about speeding up the scrutinization of accounts process, so that all could be seen to be above board in this new bountiful era.
The Minister’s next non sequitur related to the efficiency of the PAC, which did not lie, he asserted, in the number of times it met, but in what was accomplished during its meetings. A change of quorum, therefore, did not negatively affect the efficiency of the Committee. Actually, it lies in two things, both the quality of the work done in investigations, as well as in its capacity to complete the work within the time-frame required. The fact is that there is a substantial backlog, and clearing that can only be done if the Committee meets more frequently, or if it looks at the Auditor General’s reports covering the years before 2023 more superficially. The Chairman is not asking for a less thorough examination of reports, so that aspect of efficiency to which the Minister referred is not in question, merely that the PAC meets at the designated times. At an earlier stage he had asked for it to meet twice a week, instead of once, something which the government representatives vetoed.
Mr Edghill then launched into a recitation of the number of times the Committee met between 2015 and 2023. All that is irrelevant to what is happening now. There is almost a four-year backlog, so although the Auditor General is up to date, the rest of the system is stymied, including the last stage where the government issues a Treasury Memorandum to say how it has addressed the issues. In other words the government will be asking that the estimates for the current year be approved although no one has any idea what happened with expenditure, etc, last year, or for that matter, for four years before that.
Earlier this year an opposition member of the PAC was reported as saying that Accounting Officers were not receiving the desired guidance from the Committee, resulting in a repetition of issues in subsequent years. The issues emerging from the scrutiny of the 2018 and 2019 accounts did not differ from those raised by the Auditor General in his 2020 and 2021 reports, he said. At the most basic level, therefore, the backlog is interfering with the efficient functioning of the system.
Perhaps the most unbelievable allegation made by the Minister was when he said: “Is the frequency of PAC meetings a means of topping up parliamentary allowances for opposition members, by filing claims for transportation and other expenditure? Perhaps the Parliament Office should make public the expenditure incurred by PAC members for attendance.” The ramification of this is that government representatives are not attending meetings in order to save on transportation expenses and the like. This would mean in practice that the PAC can’t really operate with efficiency because if it does, too much money will be spent on getting opposition representatives to the sessions. Did the Minister read the bizarre accusation in his name and think about its implications before he approved it for distribution?
Yet there he is claiming that the government is committed to full accountability and transparency. His defences for not attending meetings are so outlandish that he cannot avoid the charge that the opposition has brought against the administration of which he is a part. If Minister Edghill would really like to persuade people of his commitment to accountability and transparency, he and Ms Gail Teixeira, both busy ministers, should take themselves off the PAC and put MPs there who have the time to attend. Mr Edghill is in any case in a potential conflict of interest situation.
In the release he referred to the opposition’s “attempt at obfuscation”. In this particular instance the ‘obfuscation’ is coming solely from his side of the House.
