A Public Accounts Committee (PAC) meeting in Parliament yesterday found the internal auditing function of government ministries was failing and that the Ministry of Finance’s internal auditing function was inadequate. Examining the Auditor General’s report on the Public Accounts of T&T for the financial year 2013, the committee raised such issues as inadequate reconciliation procedures in the Customs and Excise Division, leading to questions of differences of approximately $100 million in recorded revenue. The PAC met at the Parliament building on Wrightson Road, Port-of-Spain, yesterday.
Members of the committee also questioned the Auditor General’s discovery of payments being made without corresponding invoices being available. The Auditor General noted two instances in which payments were made accumulating to over $900,000 but no invoices could be found. Communications Minister Vasant Bharath, who is a member of the committee, queried “significant losses” incurred by ministries as well as the discrepancy at Customs and Excise. Comptroller of Customs and Excise Ammar Samaroo said the failure to reconcile figures was related to a timing issue, as a manual system of recording cash vouchers took longer than the electronic financial recording system, Asycuda. But the chairman of the committee, Colm Imbert, MP, asked whether or not this could be sufficiently proven.
Another committee member, Attorney General Anand Ramlogan, came to the Finance Ministry’s defence several times, sometimes answering questions put to permanent secretary Vishnu Dhanpaul. Imbert, while directing questions to Comptroller of Accounts Catherine Laban, asked whether a written report had been submitted by each ministry regarding compliance with procedures.
Laban said no, but added if they noticed a compliance issue, the agency or ministry would be written to and each ministry was surveyed yearly. “And what happens if you do not notice?” asked Imbert. “I am just a bit surprised. The Auditor General’s department has a very limited number of staff dealing with value for money audits. We need to fix that.”
Imbert gave the example of the recently shutdown LifeSport programme which was run through the Ministry of Sport. “If a permanent secretary in the Ministry of Sport is not following guidelines, what does the Ministry of Finance do? What do you do? How do you determine—if you didn’t do an audit of LifeSport, what procedure would you have used to ensure the PS of Sport was complying with regulations? “You have six auditors and six people will look and see if ministries are in compliance. How can six people look at all these ministries and departments? How is that humanly possible? he asked.
Bharath contributed that ministries had their own internal audit functions but added that they were failing. Imbert also said there were severe weaknesses in the internal audit functions at ministries.
“The internal audit is weak and I would assume it is the Ministry of Finance internal audit,” he added. He said he was taken aback by the inadequacy of the audit function there.