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{
    "id": 1378534,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1378534/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 190,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Nominated, ODM",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. John Mbadi",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 110,
        "legal_name": "John Mbadi Ng'ong'o",
        "slug": "john-mbadi"
    },
    "content": "entry meeting which is held with the management. The Office of the Auditor-General will take on average two to three weeks or even a month to engage with accounting staff and ask them to provide documentation. After that, a letter is issued to the management for their response. They are supposed to respond. Once that is done, there is a window of opportunity to come up with a draft report, which is prepared and given to the management before the final report. After that entire process, you will still find that documentation has not been provided to the Auditor-General as required under Section 68 of the Public Finance Management (PFM) Act, and the various provisions of the Public Audit Act. This invariably led to the Committee discussing matters that should ordinarily not feature in the final report, some as mundane as appearing before us to answer questions on why accounts were not balancing. A whole Principal Secretary appeared before us to answer questions on why the accounts could not balance. The Committee observed that accounts and finance staff in various State agencies did not maintain financial statements in real-time and waited for the end of the financial year to commence reconciliations. Therefore, the Committee recommends the following: 1. Accounting officers should henceforth comply with Section 68(2)(k) of the Public Finance Management Act, 2012 by providing supportive documentation on time. The Committee will prescribe punitive measures to accounting officers who fail to adhere to requirements of the law in this regard in subsequent audits. 2. Further, the Committee will not entertain continuous engagement between officers of the Office of the Auditor-General and accounting officers beyond the time period prescribed by law. All queries carried in the report of the Auditor- General will be considered as such and attract requisite recommendations as this. You will find that when we hold our meetings, accounting officers are still engaging the Office of the Auditor-General in a bid to clear audit queries. It is irregular and immoral. My Committee has decided that we will not entertain that from the 2022/2023 Financial Year. 3. The Departmental Committee on Finance and National Planning should consider amending the Public Finance Management Act, 2012 to reduce the time period allowed for accounting officers to submit financial accounts to the Auditor-General from three months to one month. This is because accounting officers are engaged with their accounts and process documents during the whole year. Therefore, the moment the financial year comes to an end, they do not require more than one month to prepare accounts. Accounts are supposed to be prepared in real-time, and if anything, there is an accounting system. You just need to click a button and produce financial statements if the system works. This is so that the Auditor-General gets more time to conduct audits. We only have six months to consider those accounts. We give the accounting officer three months to prepare accounts and we give the Auditor-General the other three months to audit them. We should increase the time given to the Auditor-General to five months for them to audit the accounts and give us a more reasoned opinion. The third cross-cutting issue is outstanding construction works, also known as stalled projects. The Committee encountered cases where some construction projects took inordinately long to complete for various reasons, including contractor non-performance, late exchequer issuances or releases, budget cuts, and general poor foresight and project management. On budget cuts, this House stands indicted because we allow too many supplementary budgets, which distort and disrupt the budget implementation process hence resulting in audit queries. That leads to sunk costs, general lack of value for money, and in certain cases, interest charged by contractors. My Committee is in the process of compiling this information. In the next The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor"
}