– Parliamentary Affairs Minister says
– Notes questionable practices exposed in 2016-2019 Auditor General’s reports

MINISTER of Parliamentary Affairs and Governance, Gail Teixeira says the opposition, APNU+AFC wants to skip the examination of the Auditor General’s reports in the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) for their tenure in government because questionable practices will be uncovered.

The minister made these remarks at her recent 2023 year-end press conference where she noted that though the PAC has met more times than in the previous Parliament, the opposition wants to change the quorum so as to skip past those questionable practices during their tenure.

“There’s a reason why the opposition is in a hurry; they don’t want the examination of their period, their tenure in government, and we can go into every single PAC, Auditor General report for 2016, 17, 18, 19 and 20 of very, very bad practices, shady practices, very questionable practices under their tenure; they are in a hurry to get to 2021 because they say they want to come to us,” Teixeira said.

She went on to add that those years have to be examined completely before the PAC is to move on to later years.
“Why are they in a hurry to get through their period of government, we know the answer because we know that the skeletons are buried in those reports. We are not trying to stop 2021 or 2022; that is not in our interest to do that,” she remarked.

Meanwhile giving a comparison of the number of sittings of the PAC that have been held in the twelfth, eleventh and tenth Parliament, she stated that 59 sittings were held during the twelfth Parliament while just over 40 sittings were held during the eleventh Parliament.

Further to this, she indicated: “The issue is that the Public Accounts Committee…there are no differences or vast differences; the other thing they says is that since you have to have a quorum this has led to a decrease, we can show the numbers that it in fact it has not led to a decrease in sittings.”

Last week, the Minister of Public Works and member of the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee, Juan Edghill set the record straight and noted that the committee will not gloss over the 2019 and 2020 Auditor General reports which should uncover illegalities and corruption during that period.

He added that the fact that the PAC’s quorum has changed has brought grief to the opposition as the spending of public funds in 2020 during the five-month election impasse is next on the agenda.