The Office of the Auditor General is overwhelmed by the bulging number of local administrative units across the country, according to Auditor General.
The OAG audits all funds appropriated to the central government, state enterprises, statutory corporations and local governments, among other entities. But Muwanga said last week that up to 805 local administrative units were left out of the June 2016 financial audit, whose findings were released last month, due to human resource constraints.
Uganda currently has 1,200 local government units, which according to the auditor general, cannot be covered within a period of one year. Previous audits have unearthed rot and innumerable misappropriation of public funds entrusted to local governments.
However, Muwanga says the sector remains a big challenge and calls for amendments to allow more time for auditing local governments. Muwanga was on Friday officiating at a sensitization workshop for parliament’s accountability committees, held at the Audit House.
In the workshop, legislators were briefed on key audit findings embedded in the 2015/2016 financial year report.
“On the lower-level governments, the major challenge we have is the magnitude of the local governments; they are too many; they are over 1,200 or something like that,” Muwanga said. “And with our staff complement to be able to cover them it is almost impossible.
So, we have constantly been trying to devise ways and means to ensure that all of them are covered, even to the extent of thinking that perhaps the legislation should be modified such that we do them on a rotational basis, once every three years.”
The speaker of parliament, Rebecca Kadaga, acknowledged the challenges faced by the audit office in regard to the big number of local governments, saying that parliament will find strategies on how the auditor general can exhaustively audit them.
Kadaga, who lauded the auditor general for prompt reporting, also cited a need for government to act on its officers indicated in abuse of funds. The speaker said that committees under the Tenth Parliament have exhibited great performance while acting on the auditor general’s reports but action from government remains far from impressive.
“When we debate these reports, we make recommendations, we prescribe solutions, but the government is supposed to come back to us with a treasury memorandum, to tell us what they have done about the recommendations,” Kadaga said.
“But I think that the public would be happier to see the government biting the people who have been continuously named like some of the accounting officers.
But as long as we continue recommending and they remain in office, nothing happens to them, the country will say that we are just talking and we are not doing anything. The problem is that we cannot execute; we recommend, but we cannot execute.”
By December 2016, Parliament’s committee on Commissions, Statutory Authorities and State Enterprises (Cosase) had recovered close to 50 billion shillings from five Chinese contracting companies in the roads sector following dubious dealings.
Kadaga said parliament would advocate more stringent measures that would put implicated accounting officers to book, adding that the director of public prosecutions (DPP) and the inspector general of government (IGG) have already been requested to attach officers to parliament accountability committees so that they take up potential corruption cases immediately.