The Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), established under the article 127 of the Constitution, Monday last made the audit reports on financial dealings of a number of government organizations public.
The CAG himself disclosed the contents of 17 audit reports at a press conference. This is a welcome move and needs to be sustained.
Since the people are sovereign they have the right to know how the money they pay as tax or the fund borrowed in their name is being spent. A national budget worth taka several trillion is placed and passed in parliament every year. The people do know the heads against which the allocations are made. But, on their part, there is no way of knowing whether there are irregularities in spending such large amount of money.
The CAG is responsible for auditing the 'public accounts of the Republic and of all courts of law and all authorities and officers of the Government' and submit reports to the President who, according to the article 132 of the Constitution, 'shall cause them to be laid before Parliament'.
The CAG submitted recently the audit reports on various government organizations, for a period between fiscal 2001-02 and fiscal 2009-10, to the President. A total of 17 of these reports contained 285 audit objections involving a sum of about Tk.62 billion.
The Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (BRTA), reportedly, was at the top of the list of public sector entities involved in financial irregularities. As expected, the state-owned banks have secured the second spot.
Despite slight improvement in the situation in recent years, the Auditor General's office is still lagging behind as far as auditing of the accounts of government offices is concerned. It does need to expedite the pace of its work to cover the gap of four financial years.
The situation was, however, worse in the nineties. The audit reports, placed before the parliament during that time, used to be more back-dated and, on occasions, termite-eaten.
The currency in the case of audit work remains an important issue as many relevant officials go on retirement by the time the backlog audit work is completed. Moreover, a delayed detection of financial irregularities, in most cases, dilutes the official interest in pursuing those.
There is no denying that an objection raised by an auditor does not necessarily prove that there was financial irregularity. An objection can be settled by the government offices or officials concerned by meeting queries and submitting relevant documents, provided there is a move to know truth in it.
But that is the area where the problem lies. Thousands of objections coming from the audit teams of the CAG's Office remain unattended. The offices of the Republic, which are in most cases graft -ridden, generally push the files containing audit objections under the rug.
The CAG on its part cannot initiate any action. It is the job of the relevant offices to launch investigation into audit objections on their own or ask some other agencies, including the Anti-corruption Commission (ACC), to do the needful. However, such initiatives are rarely taken.
So, the very objectives of having the accounts of the government offices audited by an independent constitutional body remain largely unmet. It is felt that appropriate follow-up actions on audit objections would have helped the government curb graft, to a great extent, on the one hand and save funds worth billions, on the other.
The people's perceptions of government offices are not at all palatable. They tend to believe, which is however not without a basis, that financial irregularities in these offices are rampant.
The CAG's audit reports, made public Monday last, would help the people to know the extent of irregularities and the names of the public sector offices that are more prone to financial offences.
Until now, the detection of financial irregularities has not prompted necessary actions on the part of the relevant government agencies. But the regular publication of the content of audit reports by the Office of the CAG would, surely, create pressure on the government to initiate a few, at least.
In the meanwhile the Office of the CAG should beef up its strength, in terms of manpower and logistics, to narrow the existing gap in its task of auditing. It should exercise its independence to the maximum possible extent (the CAG can only be removed from his/her office the way a judge of the Supreme Court is removed) to right the financial wrongs committed in the government offices with great ease.
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