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{
    "id": 510350,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/510350/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 155,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. (Ms.) Mbarire",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 78,
        "legal_name": "Cecily Mutitu Mbarire",
        "slug": "cecily-mbarire"
    },
    "content": "The Committee recommends that Accounting Officers in liaison with the National Treasury should take immediate action to ensure that Ministries or Departments adhere to the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) in sync with the Public Finance Management Act of 2012. Finally, we had the issue of unsupported expenditure where in 2012/2013, a number of Ministries and Departments failed to avail documents in support of various expenditures totalling to Kshs33,922,820,719 appearing in their respective Appropriations Accounts. The Committee observed that failure to support expenditure was a serious violation of the Constitution, statutes and regulations. The Committee further noted that in many cases, supporting documents required for audit review were submitted way out of the audit cycle. The Committee recommends the following to the Accounting Officers:- 1. That they should institute strict measures to ensure that their Ministries and Departments have in place proper record keeping systems. They must ensure strict adherence to Section 68 of the PFM Act and they must be held personally responsible and be duly surcharged for all the unsupported expenditure. Most of the issues that we dealt with were issues that should have been sorted at the time when management letters were made available by the Auditor-General to the Ministries. Most of them ignored those audit management letters and only came to deal with those issues before the Committee. That gives the Committee much more work to do than it is necessary. Imprest control was also seen to be an issue. It reviewed balances which ought to have been recovered or accounted on or before 30th June, 2013, but were still outstanding as at the date, amounting to Kshs633,178,658. The Committee observed that the Government financial regulations and procedures on imprest as supplemented by the Treasury circulars spelt out guidelines for the management of imprest and faulted Accounting Officers for failing to enforce them leading to widespread malpractices. The Committee therefore, recommends that Accounting Officers take immediate action to ensure that all outstanding imprest within their jurisdictions are fully recovered by 30th June, 2014. Accounting Officers should institute measures to ensure that the Government financial regulations and procedures on imprest, including the requirement that imprest should be surrendered within 48 hours after completion of the assignment are strictly adhered to. Accounting Officers be held responsible for failure to enforce this law. Finally, there was concern over the performance by some Accounting Officers. Some Accounting Officers, as I mentioned earlier, failed to respond to management letters from the office of the Auditor-General, had poor responses to audit queries, there were late submissions to the Auditor-General; numerous excuses to avoid or delay appearance before our Committee and failure to act on the recommendations of the PAC. Close to 60 per cent of the audit queries in this Report has been resolved by way of belated action by Accounting Officers upon being summoned by the PAC. This would most probably have never been audit queries if the Accounting Officers had sufficiently and promptly responded to the auditor’s management letters. In most cases, the Accounting Officers act of queries when just about to appear before the PAC and when ordered by the Committee during sittings. Common issues include failure to provide documents at the time of audit; failure to provide footnotes; failure to do reconciliations and provide explanations for differences between sets of records. In this regard, the Committee recommends that Accounting Officers should take the audit process seriously and ensure prompt action on the Auditor-General’s management letters to The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposes only. Acertified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}