-Auditor General to deploy team to collect, examine documents

THE parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC) was on Monday assured that a team from the Auditor General’s Office will be deployed to Region Seven as part of the committee’s query of the discovery of some $111 million in cheques in a safe.

This came to the forefront as the committee delved into the Auditor General’s report of 2019 for the region.

According to the 2019 report, an inspection of the sub-treasury’s safe on January 20, 2020, revealed that there were 142 cheques totalling some $111.024 million.

The report went on to note that no evidence of payment vouchers and related documents were seen in respect to the cheques cut and as a result, it was difficult to determine if the items were delivered or the works completed.

This issue was reportedly raised when the regional representative appeared before the committee and questions raised were not entirely answered.

As she searched for answers, Minister of Parliamentary Affairs and Governance, Gail Teixeira, asked, “How were the cheques paid without payment vouchers? Did you eventually find the payment vouchers and the documents and were these provided to the Auditor General’s Office and who signed these things without the payment vouchers being available?”

The Regional Executive Officer Kevin Ward noted that these vouchers or documents were not made available to the AG’s office.

To this end, Teixeira noted that it is critical that the information be provided to the AG’s office so that the query could be cleared and that there would not be a recurrence of such an issue in the region.

With this, she asked the committee whether the Auditor General could have a team from his office collect the vouchers or any other evidence in this regard, so that the query on that issue raised in the Auditor General’s report could be cleared up.
Auditor General Deodat Sharma told the committee that shortly he will have a team visit the region to deal with the query.

Prior to this arrangement being agreed to, Teixeira noted that in the last meeting when the committee met with the REO, the issue had to do with the dates as well as missing signatures on the documents and the payment vouchers. At that time, she stated there were only partial answers to questions that the committee had.

She highlighted, “The committee asked for the following information from the REO: the date the cheques were cut, the name of the contractors on the projects. So the list he gave us complies with that. The date on which the documents were corrected and queries addressed.”

Documents received she said, provided no information as to when the cheques were paid, a copy of the regional engineer’s log book, among other things.

She added that it was also agreed at the previous meeting that the vouchers be submitted to the accountant general for further examination to ensure due diligence.