The National | Dylan Murray | 27.08.2024
The Auditor-General's Office cannot inspect how provinces and district use funds to allocate them without financial statements and reports, the office says.
Deputy auditor-general (corporate affairs) Albert Kimis said the AG's office has not conducted a proper audit of provincial (PSIP) and district (DSIP) services improvement programs (PSIP)(DSIP) in years.
He told The National that most provincial government audits had been in arrears for the last three to five years.
Kimisi recently joined a public discussion hosted by Transparency International Papua New Guinea (TIPNG) to talk about transparency of public funds. He said conducting DSIP and PSIP audits was a challenge, as more than a billion Kina went into the two areas each year.
"The last DSIP audit we did was in 2013," he said.
"We had a special budget to conduct that audit then, but we can't find that kind of money now.
"Resourcing is a big issue for us.
"We Hardly get the budget we require each year.
Kimisi said they were currently doing audits on an ad hoc basis.
The AGs office has about 749 entities to audit to date but has a staff of 160, 100 of whom are auditors.
Besides having a shortage of manpower, their current function does not allow them to follow up with entities to see if the recommendations they made have been implement.
"Our function stops when the audit report goes to the Government," Kimis said.
"We are not a watch dog, we only audit and report findings to the Public Accounts Committee.
"But it's very sad to say that, over the past five years, the Public Accounts Committee has been very dead".
Kimisi said that not a lot of the entities they audited compiled with the finance Managment Act.
" The only portfolio in our audit work that has been up to date are the statutory bodies," he said.
They have systems in place to make sure they comply with the Finance management Act and submit a financial statement."
Meanwhile, the AG's office is looking at law reforms to give additional functions to the Auditor General to be able to follow up with the audit report is submitted.
They will be holding consultations for the law reform sometime soon.