Stricter auditing of public spending

GOVERNMENT is tightening the net around civil servants wasting the taxpayers’ money, Finance Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila said yesterday.

Speaking at the opening of the accountability conference of the Southern Africa Development Community Organisation of Public Accounts Committees and the Eastern African Association of Public Accounts Committees in Windhoek, Kuugongelwa-Amadhila said the review of new State Finance Bill and the Auditor General (AG) Bill has been concluded. The new bills will “modernise and reinforce some of the outdated views”, she said.In addition, capacity in her Ministry’s treasury department is being improved to carry out internal audits at all ministries and to ensure that the findings and recommendations of the AG get implemented.Speaking at the same occasion, Speaker Theo-Ben Gurirab called on the Office of the AG, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Accounts and the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) to work together. “It will amount to a waste of energy and resources should these institutions work in isolation from one another,” Gurirab said, adding that these bodies should also work with their counterparts in the rest of the region.Gurirab said all involved should work together “to tighten the noose around the necks of the culprits and bring them to book without delay”.“Justice delayed is justice denied,” he said.“Although no country in the world appears to have escaped corrupt, improper and wasteful practices in public procurement, fighting corruption and waste, and improving financial accountability should be at the centre of oversight of every parliamentary committee responsible for public accounts,” Gurirab said.Kuugongelwa-Amadhila said in the past the process from auditing the State Revenue Fund, tabling the report in Parliament and getting the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Accounts to schedule hearings “took far too long”. Sub-reports of spending by budget votes are now compiled and tabled in Parliament to allow the public committee to deal with the findings of the AG with individual accounting officers at a much earlier stage.“Believe me, it is quite a nasty experience for an accounting officer to be called to the Public Accounts Committee to find answers to difficult questions with the public and the media in attendance”. “But,” Kuugongelwa-Amadhila said, “this is what accountability is all about – making accounting officers answerable to the electorate for their actions and inactions.”Usutuaije Maamberua, chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Accounts, said public accounts committee in the SADC region have been promoting transparency and good financial governance of public resources since the early 2000s.