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| Controlling officers comply with new Act |
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by
Aubrey Mchulu, 24 November 2004
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08:17:41
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The newly enacted Public Finance Management Act is yet to punish non-complying controlling officers because a majority of them are providing monthly expenditure returns, a senior Treasury official said last week.
“No one has been brought to book because 90 percent of them complied as of September,” Treasury secretary Milton Kutengule said in an interview from Lilongwe.
He said Treasury expects compliance in October, whose reports are still being submitted, to be “close to 95 percent.”
Parliament passed the Public Finance Management Act and the Public Audit Act to ensure accountability of public funds by employees of public institutions.
In his budget statement, Finance Minister Goodall Gondwe said public officers will, from this year, be required to produce reports as proof of travel in a new stringent measure to curb fraud among public officers in this area.
Gondwe’s statement followed observations by the Auditor General that there was poor accountability for public funds in the country.
Travel allowances, air tickets and fuel coupons were mentioned as some of the areas where fraud was rampant.
“There is, for instance, no way of confirming that travel took place and that funds were used as designated,” Gondwe said.
Last month, Treasury withheld funding for some parastatals because they did not provide an account of how they had spent the previous month’s subventions from government.
This development led to delayed payment of salaries to employees of the parastatals in question.
Asked what the compliance rate was among parastatals given last month’s scenario, Kutengule admitted there were problems but said he hoped for an improvement this month.
“That [withholding of subvention] was like a wake up call. Most parastatals are beginning to comply,” he said.
But Kutengule could not provide concrete figures regarding parastatals’ compliance because, he said, he did not have them at hand during the telephone interview.
Under the new laws, controlling officers are required to produce reports every six months.
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