Editorial | PAC, PAAC have a role, too

The good-governance NGO Jamaica Accountability Meter Portal (JAMP) has rightly called out the failure of government ministries and agencies to properly account for how they spent trillions of dollars of taxpayers’ money and the negligence of the State’s enforcement arms in bringing them to book.

But JAMP overlooked two important bodies that have been insufficiently vigilant, if not derelict, in their obligation to ensure that public officials follow the rule while bringing transparency to the process. These are Parliament’s Public Accounts and Public Administration and Appropriation committees – the PAC and PAAC.

What JAMP did, on which it reported last week, was to tot up all the money contained in the latest annual report by the island’s auditor general (AuG) for which government ministries, agencies, and departments (MDAs) didn’t file financial statements or appropriations accounts, as is required by law, going back more than a decade. It came up to over J$3 trillion.

That doesn’t say that any of the money is missing or that taxpayers didn’t get value for it. Either way, you just can’t tell.

Or as Janet Calder, JAMP’s executive director, put it: “If you have 1,000 toilet papers in the office and somebody takes two, you won’t see it. If you have 10 and you take two, somebody will notice. We are talking about a trillion dollars.”

The auditor general produces a report annually on how the MDAs account for their financial affairs, including whether they followed the rules in spending money allocated to them by Parliament. There is plenty of rule-breaking.

GAINED PUBLIC NOTICE

More recently, though, this matter more forcefully gained public notice: in April last year, in a special report by the auditor general, Pamela Monroe Ellis, into how the health ministry spent around J$620 million at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. She found that the ministry routinely used government purchase orders – a commitment to pay if a service or good was rendered – as contracts. That approach, Ms Monroe Ellis concluded, was inconsistent with “good procurement practices” and “transparency and accountability” notwithstanding how urgently a good or service was required.

At a meeting of the PAC reviewing the report, Dunstan Bryan, then the permanent secretary in the health ministry, huffily described Ms Monroe Ellis’ report as subpar.

More than a year later, this past July, at a hearing of the PAC to review the AuG’s annual findings on the financial accounts of MDAs, Mr Bryan took issue with the characterisation of the health ministry’s failure, over more than a decade, to file its reports for nearly J$700 billion of allocations/expenditure. The health ministry’s problem, he argued, was common across MDAs, having largely to do with a shortage of accounting staff as well as, in the health ministry’s case, the reluctance of new staff to sign off vouchers and other documents they knew little about.

It is a fact that the health ministry wasn’t the only ministry highlighted by the auditor general for failing to file their accounts. JAMP counted 16 entities. Neither was it the one with the most money.

For instance, the auditor general found that up to the time of her report, the finance ministry had not provided the appropriate accounts for J$1.1 trillion Parliament allocated to it over the 2019-20 to 2022-23 financial years to service the island’s debt. During the same period, too, the finance ministry didn’t provide appropriations accounts for J$111.34 billion of its recurrent and capital allocations.

The education ministry was outed for failing to submit accounts for J$902 billion going back to the 2012-2013 financial year.

SHARES CONCERN

This newspaper shares JAMP’s concern that no public official, as is possible under the Public Management and Accountability Act, has been brought before the courts, or otherwise held accountable, for their failure to submit to the requisite minister, within the prescribed time frame, the financial accounts for tabling in Parliament. The law requires that audited accounts of public bodies should be prepared “as soon as possible after the end of the financial year, but not more than four months thereafter”.

The attorney general, the designated person to initiate court action against delinquent officials, will reasonably argue, as has been done in the past, that the office can only act on complaints or referrals from a minister or designated representative. So ministers and permanent secretaries who don’t act are equally culpable and should be held to account.

In her last report, Ms Monroe Ellis threatened that going forward, she would “commence proceedings” against public servants to collect surcharges, as is a possibility under the law, for sums for which the accounting was inadequate or improper. We look forward to her follow-through.

But the most effective and lasting action towards accountability, this newspaper feels, is consistent transparency. When they are appropriately engaged, the PAC and PAAC have proved themselves to be good vehicles for this.

The PAC conducts post facto analyses of agencies, based on reports by the AuG, which, as a matter of course, are forwarded to the committee by Parliament. Indeed, the PAC’s hearings into the last auditor’s latest annual report revealed many worrying matters. But several other issues deserved deeper scrutiny. Many public officials, unlike Mr Bryan, were not called, as The Gleaner recommended, to explain their shortcomings.

While the PAC deals with issues after the fact, the PAAC’s mandate is the ongoing, real-time review of the management of public bodies, including how they spend money allocated by Parliament.

The chairmen of the committees – Julian Robinson (PAC) and Mikael Phillips (PAAC) – who are from the Opposition, have, in the past, complained about difficulties in convening meetings, sometimes for lack of a quorum and the inability to find time or a meeting space on the parliamentary calendar.

Those may be legitimate issues, but there are always work-arounds if you are sufficiently creative and energetic.