By Chinoyi Chipulu
Economist Kelvin Chisanga says the Auditor General’s report needs proper assessment framework in order to give stakeholders confidence to show that the office is committed to transparency and accountability in its operations.
The Auditor General’s report for the financial year ended December 31, 2023, revealed a reduction in irregularities in Ministries, Provinces and Agencies from K103,519,546,579 in 2022 to K81,460,265,276 in 2023.
Chisanga said despite the report recording some reductions, the country was grappling with financial irregularities which had not helped, especially with the case of correcting the bad financial trend.
Chisanga said the country needed to take a holistic view going about this annual reporting, in order to make meaningful progress going forward.
“I think it’s high time we revisited the policy instruments attach to this country’s audit structure and public finance governance models to allow compliance in certain critical areas to foster some improvements,” he said.
Chisanga said the irregularities did not inspire the confidence in public finance management and this further affected taxation systems as well as stakeholders commitment from various funding chambers.
He also said there was also a strong need to look at many key aspects as well, with particular interests weighing on the budget implementation processes especially that at times, the country seemed to work with the national budget without allowing the full scale operations, run up to the final month of each fiscal year to allow assessing expenditure objectives, to be tested with a view of focusing on the policy objectives that were earlier set.
Chisanga said the country seemed to have some bit of hesitations on the law enforcement sides as sometimes evidence of certain matters were not always watertight to warrant prosecutions and convictions to some of these irregularities.
“So, my consolation and preposition is that the Auditor General’s report may seriously need to have some proper assessment framework and models attaching strongly on the policy actions so that this country can seal up all economic leakages with special interest to making sure that all social welfare interventions such as Farmer Input Support programme(FISP) among others, are well insulated, tightly protected and safeguarded with critical attention,” he said.
Chisanga urged the emolument commission to also make necessary amendments to allow the emolument commission Act stand suitable with the changing environments, meeting up with the demanding pressure to cater for critical payments outside the salary bracket such as allowances, consultancy fees among others.
