THE National Assembly on December 17 adopted the Report of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) for the year 2009. The committee has the responsibility for the supervision of the Audit Office of Guyana. This report contains 21 sets of recommendations, some of which would require action by the House.

Government representative on the committee, Bibi Shaddick, said that PAC was able to examine accounts for 2009 in record time and finish before another report was presented.
Shaddick said that while some of the issues in the report are new, many are repeated, such as the pension fraud issue which actually occurred in 2004, but is still mentioned in the 2009 report.
“This House needs to understand, that even though we might see these things being repeated, they are not things that necessarily happened in 2009, they might be things that happened years before 2009, but they keep coming back because they cannot, for some reason, be taken off the book,” Shaddick said.
In 2009, the PAC worked with the Audit Office which produced two Value for Money (VFM) audits, which the Committee wasn’t really satisfied with; however, the reports that were subsequently done on these audits, according to Shaddick, were very informative.
In the 2009 report, improvements were seen in the recovery of deductions that were made and paid to the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA), and in some cases, the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) in cases where agencies paid salaries to workers, but who, for some reason or the other, left the job.
“A significant number of agencies showed improvements in the way they handled the public funds and the Auditor General (AG) had less to complain about,” Shaddick said.
In September, Auditor General Ag, Deodat Sharma, presented the public accounts report for 2010 to Speaker of the House, Raphael Trotman, meeting its statutory deadline for the second consecutive year.