Finance Ministry still to provide missing financial statements
Audit of Lotto Fund
-despite Gov’t being called out for unverified spending in 2017 audit report
It has been over a year since the Audit Office of Guyana reported in its 2017 report that millions of dollars from the Guyana Lottery Fund could not be properly accounted for given the absence of crucial financial information.
Fast forward to 2019 and according to Auditor General Deodat Sharma, such information has still not been presented by the Ministry of Finance.
“I had said the financial statements were not presented for the years 2015 to 2017. We are still awaiting those statements,” the Auditor General said in a brief interview with this publication on Monday.
According to Sharma, the responsibility to submit those statements lies with the Ministry of Finance’s Accountant General’s office, where a committee was supposed to prepare the statements.
“At present, I’m still awaiting a response in terms of the arrears. But there was a special investigation being done but my thing is they should present their accounts for audit,” Sharma said.
In his 2017 report, the AG wrote that “the last set of audited accounts was for the year 2013 and at the time of this report, the Audit Office was awaiting the signed financial statement for the year 2014 to finalise the audit. However, financial statements were not presented for audit for the years 2015 to 2017”.
He had also stated that “in the absence of audited financial statements for the years 2015 to 2017 it was not possible to verify the completeness, accuracy and validity of the revenue and expenditure for the Guyana Lottery Commission for those years”.
Money from the funds has found its way as far as the controversial D’Urban Park Project, for which Public Accounts Committee (PAC) Chairman Irfaan Ali, had previously requested that further probing be done by the Auditor General. In his 2015 report, the AG had listed some $36.5 million in lotto funds being used for rehabilitative works.
Ali had stated that these requests were in relation to follow-ups from the findings that had been included in the AG’s 2015 Report. In his 2015 report, the Auditor General had said that following checks on the accounts, it was found that while Government transferred $1 billion of the lotto money to the Consolidated Fund in 2015, it held onto just over half a billion dollars to remain under the control of the Ministry of the Presidency and it spent $305 million on various activities.
But the audit into the D’Urban Park Project has always been hindered by a lack of access to pertinent information, with the Audit Office being forced to write to the Public Infrastructure Ministry requesting documents.
The controversy surrounding the D’Urban Park Project exploded when it was revealed to the public that now Public Service Minister, Dr Rupert Roopnaraine sat as a Director of a secret company, which was established to collect funds from private companies to develop the Jubilee Park.
This information was initially omitted by Public Infrastructure Minister David Patterson when he was being drilled by Opposition Members of Parliament (MPs) in the National Assembly in 2016.
