Highlights of cabinet- approved AGP restructuring plan

ISLAMABAD: The cabinet has approved an ambitious restructuring plan to make the department of the Auditor General of Pakistan (AGP) an autonomous body with administrative and financial powers delegated to the Auditor General of Pakistan. The plan will also address the issue of the maximisation of audit paras, some of which are trivial and peripheral in nature.

According to the restructuring plan, proposed by the Dr Ishrat Hussain-led top government civil service reforms body and approved by the cabinet, it is imperative to restructure the Department of the AGP to make it a modern, professional organisation. This will be done by upgrading the quality of human resources, the automation and digitisation of business processes to speed up the preparation of audit reports while minimising interaction between the auditor and those being audited and conferring operational autonomy to the AGP to carry out its functions.

The AGP supports parliamentary oversight of the management and use of public resources through reports placed before the Public Accounts Committees of the National and Provincial Assemblies. The AGP’s reports are also used by NAB, the FIA and the media as the basis for investigations and news stories.

The cabinet was told that the AGP is at present an attached department of the Ministry of Finance unlike other constitutional bodies that are autonomous bodies. It was said that the separation of accounts and audits has further necessitated that the audit function should be performed independently.

It was therefore proposed to the cabinet that the AGP should be made an autonomous body with administrative and financial powers delegated to the Auditor General. It was explained that the AGP operates 32 field audit offices located across the country where about 4,000 officials and staff are serving as public auditors for all the three tiers of government.

It was said that greater operational and financial autonomy would enable a shift from transactional audits to reports on public service delivery, timely completion, cost effectiveness and integrity of infrastructure projects, regulatory performance and the introduction of new audit methodologies for this purpose.

The cabinet was told that the workforce of the AGP is presently preoccupied with the maximisation of audit paras, some of which are trivial and peripheral in nature. Untrained accountability officials use these paras to institute inquiries and investigations and the media plays up the procedural lapses pointed out in the audit paras as financial misappropriation.

It is therefore necessary that in order to execute the new audit strategy that the skills of the workforce are aligned with the expertise required to attain the goals and mission of transparency, value for money and good governance in the public sector. The reform as approved by the cabinet also contains details of the changes required to bring about a transformation in the entire gamut of the AGP’s human resource management policies and practices.

The reform plan also underlined the need for sectoral and thematic specialisation among the audit staff in critical emerging areas such as Information Systems Audit, Debt Audit, Energy Sector Audit, Forensic Audit etc. It is said that teams will be created for the audit of specialised areas to be headed by well-trained and qualified specialists.

The restructuring plan also envisages across-the-board automation of processes, digitisation of records, documents, data and the introduction of Audit Management Information System (AMIS) along with Business Process Re-engineering.

Strengthening of the technical staff supporting the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) and the Departmental Accounts Committees (DACs), reducing the backlog and bringing the audit cycle to completion with a minimum time lag and relocation of payment functions from AGPR to the Ministries/Division, cutting down long delays in government disbursements are also part of the AGP’s restructuring plan.