PPP plugs need for Audit Office to be strengthened ahead of oil revenues

As Budget 2018 inches closer, the political Opposition is warning the Government against undermining the financial autonomy of constitutional agencies. And as oil production also creeps closer, it is also putting the Government on notice of the need to strengthen the Audit Office.

Guyana is expected to start earning revenue in the form of royalties and profit sharing, from its oil sector by 2020. Speaking to this newspaper, former Minister within the Finance Ministry, Juan Edghill, noted that with this expected inflow of money, the Audit Office of Guyana needed to be operating at full-throttle efficiency.
“Constitutional agencies must not be tricked into sitting down with the staff or the planners at the Ministry of Finance, because the Minister will then come to Parliament and say that the figures is one that was agreed upon, where their budgets will be cut privately by the Ministry of Finance,” Edghill stated.
“For instance,” he continued, “If the Audit Office makes requests for additional staffing or equipment, in preparation for first oil, we would like to see what the Minister of Finance will do, as it relates to strengthening the Audit Office in preparation for oil. So, there must be no backroom dealings.”
During the closing ceremony for a multi-year capacity-building programme held last week, Resident Representative of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Sophie Makonnen had highlighted this issue. At the time, Auditor General Deodat Sharma had been in attendance.
According to Makonnen, the independence and capacity of the Auditor General’s Office is one of the priority areas to be addressed by Guyana. She had noted that this was to ensure there were transparency and accountability with regard to oversight of the nation’s revenue and expenditure of public resources.
She had explained that the US$2 million the IDB plugged in to the capacity-building programme for the Audit Office was a component of the wider assistance provided to Guyana with regard to capacity building for the Public Sector.
The Audit Office of Guyana was reportedly plagued with a poor work environment, limited IT capacity and a huge backlog of statutory auditing among other issues prior to technical assistance from the IDB and the Government.
But while the international donor agency has been fully supportive, the same cannot be said about the Government. The proposed budget for the Audit Office was slashed by the Government in the National Assembly during consideration of the 2017 Estimates of Expenditure, and the resultant consequences had included the body grappling with not having adequate staff or adequate funds to pay them.
The proposed estimate in the last budget for the constitutional agency that is tasked with auditing “the State apparatus” was G$771.2 million, but Finance Minister Winston Jordan had decreased this sum to G$754.9 million.
The People’s Progressive Party (PPP) has been vocal in its opposition to the budgetary cut. The Party pointed out that the total budgetary allocation for constitutional agencies in 2016 was G$8 billion, whereas it was only $6 billion in 2017.
The Audit Office has a wide remit, being responsible for auditing the public accounts of Guyana and presenting reports of those audits to the Finance Minister, thence to the National Assembly. As laid out in Article 223 of the Constitution of Guyana, the Audit Office is authorised to audit all officers and authorities of the Government, including Commissions.
PPP/Civic Member of Parliament Edghill had, during a previous press conference, reminded that a budget was a financial plan which articulated the direction of an organisation and the cost to get there. Therefore, he argued, when the budgets are cut, affected organisations would now have to re-organise priorities and neglect funding for some critical undertakings.