GOVERNMENT is in the process of setting up an internal audit department in the Finance ministry to analyse Auditor-General (AG) Mildred Chiri’s reports and check if government’s books of accounts are up to date, Finance minister Patrick Chinamasa said.
BY VENERANDA LANGA
He was responding to a question in the National Assembly from Glen Norah legislator, Webster Maondera, who had asked him to explain why issues raised by the AG on accounts of ministries and parastatals between 2013 and 2015 kept recurring in 2016.
“Are you telling me that you have never read reports from 2013, including some of the reports that were brought into this House, where he, Chinamasa was said to have taken some money through airtime?” Maondera asked in the National Assembly on Wednesday.
Chinamasa said his ministry had not seen Chiri’s 2016 audit reports, claiming that these were tabled first before Parliament and not to him.
“Mr Speaker, the Auditor-General does not report to the minister of Finance and Economic Development. She reports to you,” he said.
“As government, we are in the process of setting up an internal audit with an internal auditor, who will report to me before the AG gets her report.
“So the AG is yours as Parliament, she is not mine. That is why she never told me of what she submitted to you last week.
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“So, we will also have sight of it in the form that she gave it to you.”
Chinamasa said, all along, his ministry did not have the apparatus to go through the AG’s reports, adding it was through pressure from the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Public Accounts that his ministry was beginning to put in place mechanisms to study and interrogate the AG’s reports, so that corrective action can be taken, including the issue that he abused airtime.
The 2016 audit reports, which Chiri tabled last week in Parliament, revealed weak control mechanisms by government fund accounts, where loans worth $92 million to parastatals were issued without signing loan agreements.
Ministries also failed to collect amounts due from their clients and employees totalling $49 million, and debtors increased by 87% to $91 million.
Chiri also said ministries continued to acquire goods and services from suppliers, although they did not have the financial resources to meet the expenditure resulting in a $30,5 million increase of amounts owed to suppliers from last year’s figure of $53 million, resulting in the current balance of $84 million.
