The office of Prosecutor General has written to various Government institutions, demanding an immediate explanation to the alleged mismanagement of public funds, The New Times has learnt. The Auditor General’s (AG) report of the Fiscal Year 2007 unearthed a whopping Rwf6.5b of taxpayers’ money missing. “The office of Prosecutor General wrote to many institution heads to explain the alleged mismanagement of public funds,” a source who requested not to be named said, adding that several leaders had complied. Prosecution Spokesperson, Augustine Nkusi confirmed the development yesterday in a telephone interview. “We wrote to them,” Nkusi said without mentioning the institutions. “Our interest is to find out whether the mistakes committed were criminal or administrative.” While presenting last year’s annual report to a joint session of Senators and Deputies, Evelyn Kamagaju told lawmakers that 86 percent of the funds unaccounted for were in the Local Government ministry. “In all government entities audited in 2007, we discovered a sum of Rwf 6,524,683,240 unaccounted for. Much of this money is either teachers’ or medical practitioners’ salaries that could not be justified,” Kamagaju told the legislators. The figure had gone up by about Rwf 1.2b compared to the previous report which had indicated a sum of Rwf 5.3 billion ($9.7 million) that was unaccounted for during the fiscal year 2006. However, the increase in the figure was attributed to an increase in number of institutions that the audit covered. The specialty of the 2007 report is that it lists a number of forgery cases that happened on the district levels especially officials falsifying bank cheques and altering figures in documents. For instance, audited Government bodies were awarded tenders worth some Rwf 2.1 billion without the approval of the Rwanda Public Procurement Authority (RPPA) as the law stipulates. The 2007 report also unearthed Rwf7.6bn debts payable to the government while it is also supposed to receive a sum of Rwf 27.5bn receivables from debts - all these funds were not indicated in books of accounts that the Auditor General audited. Some institutions had sent to the office of Auditor General unbalanced reports and Financial Statements that contained contradicting figures in the State Consolidated Financial Statements sent by the Ministry of Finance. The Auditor General has in the past complained that some institutions were not cooperative during the auditing exercise, and that they do not keep proper books of accounts. Ends
