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{
    "id": 1123899,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1123899/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 316,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. M. Kajwang’",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13162,
        "legal_name": "Moses Otieno Kajwang'",
        "slug": "moses-otieno-kajwang"
    },
    "content": "What do we want to achieve with this annual performance report? Initially we based our audit and oversight on financial performance. Counties have mastered the game. They know how to get unqualified opinions. In Chinua Achebe’s Things FallApart, Eneke the bird says that since men have learned to shoot without missing, he has learned to fly without perching. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir that is what is happening in our county governments. It is a combination of accrued experience. Let me deal with the positive side. We have finance officers in our county governments who have been in those offices since the advent of devolution. They now understand better how to render their books of account. The conversation with the Senate has helped them to see the pitfalls. The five or six years has improved the capacity of our officers at the county to comply with the Public Sector Accounting Standards (PSAS). On the other hand, they have also learnt how to collude with whoever they need to collude with to ensure that their books of accounts are clean. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, you will get a county with an unqualified opinion and yet there is a hospital that was built that was in the books complete, but it is not rendering services. We need to move from financial audit to performance audit. When I listened to the speakers, it struck me that if we built the capacity of the Auditor-General, then this performance report should then be sent to the Auditor-General. The Auditor-General will then do a performance audit on them and send it back to the county assembly and the Senate. That way, it will be synthesized. That is a conversation that we can have so that the Senate and the county assembly do not get a raw report. More importantly, for financial reports, we have the public sector accounting standards, which prescribe the format of a financial report. We will also have to prescribe the format of the annual performance report because it is not there. The Act only gives broad guidelines on how it should be. One county might give you a 500-page report and another one a one paged report. If the Auditor-General can help us come up with a reporting template for the annual report, it will be extremely useful. I encourage Sen. (Eng.) Hargura that once it is in the law, compliance will not be optional, but it will be mandatory."
}