Months have turned into years and the government is yet to reveal the audited accounts for the expenditure associated with the 2005 Flood, the 2007 World Cup and the Carifesta X festivities held here, despite repeatedly promising to do so.
Several calls by the opposition parties for the disclosure of these accounts have apparently fallen on deaf ears and at least one opposition party is considering pursuing these matters in the Public Accounts Committee and the Economic Services Committee of the Parliament.
In December 2008, Sport Minister Dr Frank Anthony promised that the accounts for the stage of the Cricket World Cup event held here in March 2007 would have been released before the end of the year. At that time, he said he had the draft of the audited accounts in his possession, which would have to be reviewed again before they were released. In relation to the accounts for the Carifesta X festivities held here in August of 2008, Anthony said these would have been audited at the end of 2008 by the Auditor General with the general accounts of the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport. Anthony had promised too that the audited accounts would be made available.
Almost two years have passed since Anthony made these promises and nothing has happened to date. The minister has not responded to queries on the matter by this newspaper and neither has Finance Minister Dr Ashni Singh.
When contacted, Alliance For Change Leader Raphael Trotman told Stabroek News that these were issues that could and should be addressed in the committees. According to him, the issues can be examined from different angles in the Public Accounts Committee and the Economic Services Committee.
Trotman said he will talk with his party’s leadership regarding the possibility of the AFC raising the matters in these committees.
Freedom of Information
Asked about the possibility of matters relating to these outstanding accounts being raised in the committees, Everall Franklin of GAP/ROAR said it could be done but that there would still be obstacles to having full disclosure on the matters.
“It can be done but we’ll still have a problem of accessing information,” he said. “The overall mechanism that is missing would be the Freedom of Information,” he said, adding that whatever answers were supplied by the government would need to be tested against other information that the administration has traditionally been reluctant to release.
Franklin opined that the government may not have released the accounts because they are not ready. “People have not even been paid for services rendered during these events,” he said. Stabroek News has confirmed that some persons who offered services during Carifesta X have up to now only been partially paid amounts that they had been promised.
Franklin said it has been argued that one of the reasons Anthony is not being touted as a possible presidential candidate for the PPP at next year’s election may be because he has “been a failure at every event he has touched”.
The parliamentary committees
The Public Accounts Committee is one of the standing committees in the National Assembly. According to the website of the Guyana Parliament, the role of the Public Accounts Committee is “to examine the accounts showing the appropriation of the sums granted by Parliament to meet public expenditure and other accounts laid before the Assembly and referred to it by the Assembly along with the Auditor General’s Report.” The website said the PAC supervises the functioning of the Office of the Auditor General in accordance with the Auditor General’s Rules, Policies and Procedures Manual.
The Economic Services Committee is a sectoral committee in the Parliament. The committee is responsible for the scrutiny of government policy and administration to determine whether the execution of the administration’s policy is “in consonance with the principle of good governance and in the best interest of the nation.”
PNCR-1G MP Volda Lawrence, who is Chairperson of the Public Accounts Commit-tee, said that the power of the body is limited to looking at audited accounts that are produced by the Auditor General. If the audited accounts are not produced, the committee cannot report on them, she said.
Asked whether, the committee could attempt to ensure that the accounts are audited Lawrence said this was outside the committee’s mandate. “There is nothing that we can do because it is outside our mandate,” she said.
She said that as a party, the PNCR-1G has used the parliamentary forum to ask questions about these unaudited accounts and continue to speak about them at their press conferences. “These are important issues, she said, and the press has a very important role to play in highlighting them because Guyanese tend to forget things quickly.” She said that the party has occasionally asked questions in the National Assembly about these accounts but noted that this has not resulted in the government producing them.
Stabroek News was unsuccessful in its efforts to contact Acting Auditor General Deodat Sharma for comment on the issue.
