PESHAWAR: The Finance Department has retrieved Rs 11.5 billion “parked” at the designated accounts of the provincial Textbook Board and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Highways Authority (KPHA).
The amount recovered is part of the Rs30 billion development funds that around 34 government departments had deposited in their designated accounts in the private and public sector banks. The funds were neither utilised on development schemes in the province nor returned to the public exchequer.
These departments include Peshawar Development Authority(PDA), Finance, Health, Textbook Board, Elementary and Secondary Education, Local Government, Environment, Higher Education, Law, Industries, Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education of Peshawar and Abbottabad, the erstwhile Sarhad Development Authority (SDA), Small Industries Development Board (SIDB), Board of Revenue, Frontier Education Foundation, Information Department, Sports and Tourism, Technical and Vocational Education Board, Zakat and Social Welfare, Food Department, Social Security and Employees, Agriculture, Housing, Police, Auqaf, Hajj and Religious Affairs, Telecommunication and Development, Labour, Home and Tribal Affairs, Chief Minister’s Secretariat and Minerals.
It is to be mentioned here that the Finance Department through a regression analysis detected accounts having the deposits of around Rs1.7 trillion of the government departments of which Rs30 billion has been detected in private banks.
The lack of reporting and feedback to the Finance Department on the development funds over the last 30 years led to irregularities in deposit and unutilisation of the uplift funds by the government departments.
The Finance Department recently started work on these accounts and detected some accounts where billions of uplift funds remained “parked” for years.Recently, it retrieved an amount of Rs 5 billion from the designated account of the KPHA. There were savings in the projects of the Authority, but it didn’t return the money as its account procedure allowed it to keep the unutilised in its designated account.
Talking to The News on Tuesday, Secretary Finance ShakeelQadir cited lack of IT (information technology) and weak financial management as the reasons for the inconspicuousness of development funds that remained parked in the designated accounts of the government departments.
He admitted that they still lagged behind in the IT. “The IT solutions have arrived, but Finance has not been converted to it,” he pointed out.
“Our system of procedures actually did not catch up with the way the things were changing. But now we are moving with the IT solutions to resolve the issues around the funds allocation, utilization and feedback. By initiating an efficient reporting system on the development, other funds and performance budget we have overcome the issue of weak financial management,” he maintained.
He said the provincial government has implemented the performance criteria and every department and local governance tier down to the village and neighbourhood councils have to provide real time feedback on the utilization to get more funds.
“The performance criteria and reporting on the utilization as a prerequisite for further releases led to the detection of the funds lying in the designated accounts,” he said. “Now most of the departments are coming to us with the information of their designated accounts. They themselves want to do away with the irregularity in the funds parked in these accounts. They seek ex-post facto approval to utilize these amounts,” added the Finance secretary.
“The Textbook Board case is the textbook case in this regard. We have made Textbook Board a textbook case when it comes to the financial management and recovery of the funds that remained parked for years in the designated accounts of the government departments,” ShakeelQadir explained.
“This is an interesting case study of the designated accounts. Around Rs6.5 billion was detected in the designated account of the Textbook Board and nobody had never asked it as to wherefrom the amount came into its account,” he said.
He said that an amount of Rs500 million was left with the Textbook Board to meet obligations and the minister Education and the Textbook Board have agreed to credit Rs6 billion to the Finance Department in the next seven to eight days.
ShakeelQadir stated that KPHA and Textbook were not the last departments that returned the funds lying idle in their accounts. “The SIDB, Technical Education Board, the Board of Intermediate and Secondary Board Peshawar and Abbottabad and many others are also in the line and we will milk out the money from them as well,” he said.
