Rusted mechanism

This refers to the editorial ‘Covid audit’ (December 2). It discusses that the auditor general’s report on the Covid-19 expenditure has revealed massive irregularities in spending, running in billions of rupees. Under Articles 169 and 170 of the constitution and the AGP Ordinance 2001, the auditor general is to make such audits of public spending annually. These audits, however, are mostly sensational disclosures of irregular expenditures without any recoveries being made.

Previous audit objections are still pending and soon the Covid-19 audit objections shall meet the same fate. It is also unfortunate that when the Supreme Court took suo motu notice of the irregularities in the money spent by the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) no one did anything. There is just one approach to the problem at the moment: when the auditor general points out objections on expenditures, the head of the institution and CFO are suspended from office. Then a series of meetings are held on these audit objections with those facing charges of irregularities using huge sums of money on trips to and from the meetings causing further loss to the national exchequer. To use audit objections as deterrents, steps must be taken to recover the lost amount from the beneficiary within 30 days.

Mukhtar Ahmed

Karachi