The Transport ministry incurred a $2 million telephone bill between 2012 and 2015 due to weak controls in telephone usage by members of staff.
BY VENERANDA LANGA
This came out in the third report by the Public Accounts Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on the 2014 and 2015 Appropriation and Fund Accounts for the Transport ministry, which was presented recently in the National Assembly by committee chairperson Paurina Mpariwa.
“The audit observed that the ministry’s telephones at the head office were open to members of staff via the switchboard, but there were no controls in place to monitor and limit time spent on calls,” she said.
“The ministry incurred a bill amounting to $1 919 774, which has been outstanding since 2012, and the secretary (then Munesuishe Munodawafa) informed the committee that they had since installed a PABX system, which would make it possible to monitor and control usage.”
Mpariwa said since the ministry installed the PABX system, telephone usage by staff then went down, with the government now paying an average $649 per month in telephone bills.
The committee report said MPs were also not pleased by a case of fraud, where the Transport ministry suffered a loss of $181 950 after an accounts clerk based in Victoria Falls connived with a Vehicle Inspection Department (VID) official and a bank employee to under-bank.
“The fraud had not been detected until after the audit, and the ministry suspected there was connivance between a VID official and a bank employee,” the report read.
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“It was a question of under-banking which was concealed by the two individuals involved which went on for some time. The official absconded from work after the matter was reported to the police.”
The ministry responded to the fraud by instructing the Pensions Office to stop disbursement of terminal benefits accruing to the employee in question as a way of recovering the funds.
“The fact that the ministry admitted that it took long for it to detect the fraud points to lack of supervision in the ministry. There is a danger that government might be losing a lot of funds through such fraudulent activities,” the committee said.
Parliament then recommended that the Transport ministry reports the matter to the police by July 31, 2017 to ensure that the culprit is brought to book, as merely depriving fraudulent employees of their terminal benefits was not enough.
