Three years after 197 items of furniture were destroyed or stolen because the Ministry of Agriculture failed to safeguard them after the reorganising of the Crops and Livestock Support Services Division, the ministry is still unable to properly account for the losses.
The issue came up for discussion yesterday as the Public Accounts Commit-tee (PAC) scrutinised discrepancies uncovered in the Auditor General’s 2011 report, which highlighted the case.
The Auditor General’s Office observed that “197 items of furniture and equipment could not be accounted after transfers were conducted when the Crops and Livestock Support Services Division was reformulated.” There was no indication of how much money this loss represented.
Following the loss, the ministry sought to have the assets written off, but the process has not yet been completed.
Asked why measures were not put in place to ensure the safety of the items until they were ready to be transferred, Perma-nent Secretary of the Ministry George Jarvis, who represented the ministry along with another accounting officer before the PAC yesterday, said that the furniture that was meant to be moved was transferred to their destination.
The items that were left in the open and subjected to damage from rain and other inclement weather, he told members of the PAC, were already in a bad state and were in the process of being written off.
Hearing this explanation, APNU MP Jaipaul Sharma asked why the items were included in the Auditor General’s Report if they were obsolete and in the process of being written off.
It was then that PPP/C MP Bibi Shadick noted that the matter had been brought before the committee before, and that the items that were affected as a result of being left untended out in the open were not at all obsolete.
She said that the explanation that was given at the time the matter first engaged the PAC is that the furniture and equipment were left in the yard of the Ministry of Agriculture and were waiting to be transported when the rain came and wet them.
“These things were not called obsolete to begin with, they were earmarked to be taken to the entity,” said.
Even the ministry’s response to the Auditor General’s report went against the explanation offered by Jarvis. The response read: “Investi-gation was launched and it revealed that the assets were placed in the compound of the Ministry of Agriculture, since the new offices were not completed and could not properly accommodate the assets. As a result, many of the assets were destroyed by weather.
Some of the assets that were eventually transferred to the new offices could not have been placed in the building because of the inadequacy of space and this resulted in some of the assets being stolen. The remaining assets were located, inventoried and are presently in use in the Office of both [National Agricultural Research and Extension Institute] NAREI and [Guyana Livestock Deve-lopment Agency] GLDA.”
PPP/C MP Gail Teixeira, commenting on the items that were stolen, asked Jarvis what has been done by the ministry to try to resolve the criminal aspect of the matter. She suggested that the police could have been called in and asked if this step had been taken.
But Jarvis seemed unsure of what actions, if any, had been taken by his ministry in this regard, and after a few moments of silence, and conferring with his fellow representative, he told the committee that he thinks a police report was made, although he admitted he could not say for sure.
He was therefore asked by the committee to clarify the entire matter, and provide the relevant answers within two weeks.
It should also be stated that Auditor General Deodat Sharma, complained that when his office carried out an audit of the ministry, his personnel were not supplied with a comprehensive list of all the furniture that should have been documented.
