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{
    "id": 945632,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/945632/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 391,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Mutula Kilonzo Jnr",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13156,
        "legal_name": "Mutula Kilonzo Jnr",
        "slug": "mutula-kilonzo-jnr"
    },
    "content": "own independent verification of information and projects. This will help us do two things; that is financial audit and performance. This is because these county executives have become very clever, but not too clever. They have become clever with the paper work. They do it overnight, forge documents and create a beautiful rosy picture of mega grand projects that only exist in the figment of their imagination. Justice Kwach used to call it a Frankenstein of your imagination in reference to the Goldenberg scam. Once we get the public to give you information, we must get an auditor ourselves to go to those various projects. Sen. Kibiru was talking about stalled projects and individual Senators are unable to verify anything. How would we do it? What format? If you walked into a building that cost Kshs20 million, how would you audit it? What method would we use? Sen. M. Kajwang’, please, consider bringing a recommendation here to amend the law to have a Senate Audit Office that we can use. You and I were in the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) in America and we saw how they do legislative auditing. We can do it. We would use our own auditors for those petitions that are here by members of the public and the county assembly members and then we would not bother some of these Committees to do this work where we are asking Senators to become auditors, quantity surveyors, architects or have the expertise that you do not have and do not know where to source from because some of it is very technical. I want to finish by saying that the prudent use of public resources should not be an option; it should be the norm. I travelled to Germany and the auditor who is called the president was surprised that we audit the auditor. This lady was shocked beyond belief that we, Parliamentarians, can audit an auditor. It means if an auditor tables a report, we are busy auditing. According to her, once the auditor tables a report, it ends there. That is a report for implementation. Perhaps, we will get there. The Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Kenya (ICPAK) said something very important today. They said that there is very little discrepancy between what the auditor tables at the National Assembly and what they finally approve. In audit terms, they say the difference is negligible. Therefore, there is no reason why the audit of National Assembly should not be a 2017/2018 on the basis that even when they audit, the differences are negligible. They have proposed that if you do not audit or approve within the time specified in three months in the law, it is deemed approved. The same way in the PFM regulations that if we do not approve the regulations within a specific period, they are deemed approved. Perhaps, in order to improve our audit processes, that is one avenue. I hope that Sen. M. Kajwang’ and we will assist him where we can by giving him the necessary support which includes and not limited to ensuring that his reports are our business every day. There is no business that we should be doing other than audits. No other business is as important as this."
}