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{
    "id": 606680,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/606680/?format=api",
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    "content": "“The Auditor-General shall appoint a chairperson” What we said is that he does not have to appoint because it does not look pretty. When the Auditor-General has an advisory board and he is the one to appoint the chairman for that advisory board, it does not look good. We agreed that they will appoint one from amongst themselves to be the chairman and the only thing we amended there is that the Auditor-General may co-opt two other members with the necessary expertise. This is as it was in the amendments that we had submitted. We did not have a problem with that and so we included the following:- “The Members of the Advisory Board shall elect a chairperson from among themselves who shall not be the Auditor-General so that any of the other members can be elected as the Chair”. We found that satisfactory. Then Clause 33 on the next page is on the work of the internal auditor. This is not much. We said that the final report of an internal auditor of a state organ may be copied to the Auditor-General. In our amendments, we changed it to “shall be copied to the Auditor-General”, so that every state organ or Ministry, any internal audit must be copied. That is what we had said, but what the Members of the National Assembly pointed out is that in Clause 2 we had actually said that the Auditor-General shall have unhindered access to all internal audit reports. Since that provision is there, we felt that it does not have to be compulsory that every organ shall send internal audit reports. We said that “may be copied to” is adequate and he will have access to any organ if he so wishes. On Clause 39 – Auditing of National Security Organs, we had made some amendments. We deleted 39 (1) which reads as follows:- “In auditing national security organs, the Auditor-General or his or her representatives shall hold an inception meeting at the highest level to agree on areas which may touch on national security and consequently determine the scope of the audit coverage”. We thought that this last sentence would be limiting the scope of the audit and this interferes with the functional independence of the Auditor-General. So, we said that this is not acceptable and we had deleted the whole clause. Now, when the Members of the National Assembly raised a concern on that, we agreed on the following which to us was very satisfactory; that in auditing national security organs, the Auditor-General and his or her representatives shall hold an inception meeting at the highest level pursuant to Section 30(1) (b) which talks about how the auditor prepares himself for specific audits. It is applicable to all of them. The amendment that we brought was by deleting the words “determining the scope of audit coverage” and instead we said insert the words “determine the appropriate audit approach that shall ensure confidentiality of information” in place thereof. The main concern here was to keep certain information on certain aspects of the audit confidential. So, they will just agree on that during the process of audit when they are discussing at the inception. We found that agreeable. The second item; 39 (2) was retained the way we suggested. We had deleted Clause 3 and they had said that they wanted us to retain it. This is about the vetting of the auditors. The argument is that the practice worldwide is that if The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposes only. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor, Senate."
}