The Auditor General needs as much help as possible

Editor, I was extremely shocked when reading through the Auditor General’s report especially when I came across the fact that the Road Maintenance Fund (FER) spent 10,292,578,499Rwf on 62 tenders during the year ended 31/12/2008 without any important documents such as internal tender committee meeting minutes, performance guarantees, bid security, and tender evaluation reports. Because of all these omissions, the Auditor General’s office could not express the opinion as to whether FER satisfied the fundamental principles of transparency, competition, economy, efficiency, fairness and accountability as provided for by Art. 4 of the law number 12/2007 of 29/3/2007 governing public procurement. As if this was not enough the FER went ahead and engage private auditors without consulting the Auditor general for approval; something that violated the Constitution in its Article 183. My appeal is that FER and other institutions that fall in the same category be brought to book and forced to explain why they behaved this way. The Auditor General has a lot to do if out of the 115 qualified reports only 2 were unqualified. This kind of work load shows that the oversight responsibility should be totally on the AG’s shoulders. Therefore I’m calling on all the oversight bodies such as the various chambers of Parliament, the NPPA, MINICOFIN and others to help against the scourge of bad accounting and waste of tax payer monies. Simon MugishaRemera. simomug@yahoo.com

Opinions

The Auditor General needs as much help as possible