No respect for auditor’s reports

 ONCE again it falls to this newspaper to publish old news, boring news about the state of accounts in this country.

The reports by the Auditor-General and by the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee are simply ignored out of hand.

Each time such a report is tabled, an MP will ask for Parliament to take note of the report and for debate to be deferred. Of course, the deferred debate rarely, if ever, takes place.

And so material evidence of discrepancies in the keeping of accounts, of sheer dishonesty, of theft, of not following process and procedures and of plain breaking the law just gets ignored.

Yet at every forum, in every speech and every major government pronouncement, leaders big and small rant and rave about transparency and accountabi­lity, about how graft, fraud, corruption and their like are swirling nightmarish storms which are about to swallow PNG up.

They are right about one thing. These storms will swallow up individuals, corporations and even the country but the greatest danger lies in not ta­king heed of warnings such as those given by the Auditor-General and the Public Accounts Committee and in not implementing all their recommendations.

We note today that the Auditor-General’s reports are becoming  more mono­tonous, repetitious in places and not as detailed as they once were.

If this is because the Auditor-General’s office feels its efforts are not appreciated or its recommendations implemented or its cries for increased resources and more powers are not heeded, we sympathise completely.

No department is spared. No department or agency’s record-keeping is above board.

How more direct can any report get when the Auditor-General reports, as he did in 2010 into the operations of the Office of Rural Development (ORD), that 85%  of cheques paid under the district services improvement programme could not be traced because most of them were made at Parliament Haus without any proper records kept.

The report said that officers were under political pressure and the office had no control over the funds.

It stated that it could neither trace the payments nor how they had been spent in the districts because documentation and records were not kept at district treasuries.

It is positively alarming that the Office of Rural Development admitted that the audit observation was correct and that there was no register kept. It also  agreed that some “political pressure” might have been involved in the making of certain payments.

Are these the kind of revelations that are keeping politicians from debating the reports?

How is it possible, for instance, that the ORD is ordered by telephone call to transfer K89 million or K1 million, each meant for feeder-road construction in each of the 89 open electorates, back to the Finance Department?

In addition to the lack of documentation, names and signatures of cheque-issuing officers have not been entered making it impossible to identify persons responsible for signing and delivering cheques.

Earlier audit reports have mentioned that the Rural Development Programmes have not been audited at all and that only general observations have been made on the spending of these funds, now running at K10 million per district.

Payment and procurement procedures and assets register kept by the office also attracted negative criticism from the Auditor-General.

This is repeated for most departments and agencies in the country. And this really is the heart of PNG’s problems – the inability to attend to matters as simple as record-keeping and following regulations and laws.