By Johann Earle
Since the commencement of Lotto and other lottery games back in 1995, the Government of Guyana has, up to 2006, received approximately $2.686 billion as its share of the proceeds.
The monies have not entered the Consolidated Fund but continue to be used by the Office of the President to finance various projects with little or no parliamentary oversight.
This is despite repeated calls from the opposition parties for this to be corrected. The Audit Office has year after year repeated that such proceeds are public revenues which should be paid over to the Consolidated Fund in accordance with Section 17 of the Financial Administration and Audit Act (FAA) and that any public expenditure must be approved by Parliament through appropriation.
The government’s share of 24 per cent of gross lottery takings is paid to the Govern-ment’s Lotteries Fund bank account No. 3119. The reports over the years noted that proceeds from these accounts are public revenues, which are required to be paid over to the Consolidated Fund and any related expenditures met from appropriations by Parliament. “The use of such funds to meet public expenditure is therefore a breach of not only the FAA Act but also parliamentary approval to incur expenditure,” said the report of 1999.
According to the 2005 Report of the Auditor General, among the expenditure of Lotto funds that year was $133 million to the Ministry of Culture Youth and Sport for the rehabilitation of the National Cultural Centre. The Ministry of Amerindian Affairs received $33.4 million for Amerindian Heritage Month activities. The Minis-try of Housing was handed $45.1 million for the implementation of the D’Urban Park Development Project. Some $38.2 million went to the President’s Youth Choice Initiative (PYCI) for rehabilitation and administrative and security fees, and $24.7 million was given to the Ministry of Public Works for site preparation of the cricket stadium at Providence.
The PYCI has been one of the largest beneficiaries of Lotto funds over the years and the tally of projects funded run in the hundreds across the country to the tune of over $800 million. However, many of these projects have fallen prey to disrepair, theft and general disinterest by the young people set up to manage them.
Meanwhile, the 2006 report will be released in June, but this newspaper has been reliably informed that for that year, the sum received as Lotto funds was $286.5 million. The government’s taking for 2007 is unavailable as these records are currently being audited.
During one of the recent sittings of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) acting Auditor General Deodat Sharma had stated that his office would have been revisiting the method by which government handles the Lotto funds. Reports since 2003 do not place focus on the stated breaches of the FAA Act and lists instead how the funds were spent. Sharma’s predecessor Anand Goolsarran was markedly stronger in his comments about the way government used the funds.
Former Chairman of the PAC, Winston Murray, told this newspaper on Friday last that Parliament has no knowledge of the expenditure of the funds since the monies are lodged in a bank account held by the Ministry of Finance. “There is no oversight to know whether the amount paid is accurate for the project,” Murray said. He added that the National Assembly has no knowledge of the withdrawals from the bank account.
He said although the Audit Office audits the projects funded with the Lotto resources, the propriety of the source of the funding of those projects is not audited. “The Auditor General could only talk of the proper use of the money on the projects, not on the propriety of access to the resources,” Murray said.
In the 2003 public accounts, Goolsarran had stated that in previous reports, he had had cause to highlight the Ministry of Finance’s failure to pay over government’s share of lottery proceeds to the Consolidated Fund. These funds were instead paid to a special bank account and this was used to meet public expenditure without Parliamentary approval, that report said.
Goolsarran stated in the report that he had discussed the issue with the Head of State “who had agreed that at the end of each year transfers would be made to the Consolidated Fund to the extent of funds utilised from the Lotteries Account.” It was agreed at the time that a corresponding supplementary estimate would be passed in the National Assembly to ensure parliamentary approval of the expenditure and its recording in the Public Accounts.
Goolsarran had recommended in the 2003 report that the Ministry of Finance takes appropriate action on his recommendations; nothing has been done.
The PAC had, on numerous occasions, pointed to Article 217 of the Constitution, which reads: “All revenues or other monies raised or received by the government (not being revenues or other monies that are payable, by or under an Act of Parliament, into some other fund established for any specific purpose or that may, by or under such an Act, be retained by the authority that received them for the purpose of defraying the expenses of that authority) shall be paid into and form one Consolidated Fund.”
Government has been making the argument that because a listing of the expenditure appears yearly in the Auditor General’s report, the money was being properly accounted for. But the PNCR believes that such a mention in the report every year cannot substitute for government’s lack of compliance with a requirement of the Constitution.
