Auditor General’s office require K7 billion budgetary allocation
Auditor General, Stevenson Kamphasa said for his office requires K7 billion budgetary allocations for it to effectively and efficiently audit books for various Ministries, Government Department and Agencies (MDAs).
During an interface meeting with Members of Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of Parliament organized by Oxfam at Sunbird Capital hotel in Lilongwe, last week, Kamphasa said with the current budgetary allocation his office is receive is making it difficult to execute auditing exercise in various MDAs.
“This has resulted into accumulating a lot of audit backlogs due to lack of funding. It will help us to adequately do the auditing in various government agencies in time and present them to parliament for them to get clarifications from Responsible officers,” Kamphasa suggested.
He appealed to members of PAC to lobby for an increasing funding so that the work of the Audit Office should be appreciated by all unlike the current situation where they are a lot backlog issues.
The Auditor General said the audit could not perform efficiently if the budgetary allocation is so limited for it to carry out its mandate.
Kamphasa commended the World Bank providing financial assistance so that his office should clear the audit backlog the country had.
He believes that once government provides adequate financial resources to his office the audits for the country would be up to date since auditing would be done periodically.
Oxfam Interim Country Director, Lingalireni Mihowa said the Office of Auditor General wants to implement performance audits according to the recommendation made by her office.
She said the Office would not only look at figures but on results of resources that different government agencies did
“We have noticed that most of the time audit reports have been financially with figures but at the end of the day we want to see these expenses were carried out different agencies. We want to seewhat these expenses will translate into,” Mihowa stated
Why does AG need need an expenditure budget of MK7 billion for. What successes have you achieved over the years. The AG office is a waste of money in as long as it has no teeth. All the AG does is wasting paper after paper with findings which no one takes seriously. Until such time the law is amended to give the AG office power to sanction offenders or it is able to pass cases to ACB (which is useless anyway) AG will remain a lame duck. MK7 billion is a waste of taxpayers money which can be used for… Read more »