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{
    "id": 924632,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/924632/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 509,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Olekina",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 407,
        "legal_name": "Ledama Olekina",
        "slug": "ledama-olekina"
    },
    "content": "the Controller of Budget was withholding about Ksh6 billion of their money in the account. This led us to understand that these county governments did not have a clue on the entire budgeting process. There was a very serious risk in terms of counties involving staff in the counties on the issue of financial management. Most staff who were managing these county funds had no clue of what they were supposed to do. They neither understood how they were supposed to carry out the monthly reconciliations, which the Public Finance Management Act (PFM) calls for, nor the audit process. When these counties appeared before our Committee, the governors would try to say that they provided this information to the auditors, who refused to consider their reasons as to why the money was spent in a certain way. The problem we had with these counties is that none of the staff tasked with the accounting duty had any clue on what the law stipulated. Mr. Speaker, Sir, Section 35 of the Public Audit Act – which was mostly abused by these counties – is very clear on the audit process. Most of the governors would appear and say that they participated in the audit process. However, they did not understand why they received a disclaimer of opinion, which was issued because of the limitation of scope. That means that no documentation was provided for audit. Some of the governors came up with the excuse of fire incidents, which destroyed all the accounting documents. These are very serious risks which led our Committee to come up with various recommendations on how we can ensure that funds forwarded to the county governments are properly utilized. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I am quite happy that we are thinking ahead, even as we consider this Fiduciary Risk Report. Sen. (Dr.) Zani has come up with an amendment to the PFM Act so that all counties can have a proper system where they can record their own-source revenue. It is very serious that when you look at all these counties, they relied heavily on the shareable revenue."
}