No bipartisan support at PAC for separate scrutiny of 2019, 2020 AG reports

– PAC Chair wants Committee to forge ahead with merging reports

On Friday, Governance and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Gail Teixeira wrote the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) Chairman and members of the committee, requesting that the 2019 and 2020 fiscal years not be combined, to better enable scrutiny of the Auditor General Reports.
However, PAC Chairman Jermaine Figueira is opposed to this idea. This publication spoke to Figueira on Monday, after the statutory meeting of the PAC at Parliament Buildings had to be adjourned because of a lack of a quorum – the second consecutive week this has happened.

Figueira pointed to the absence of the Government members of the PAC, as one reason why the committee’s work must be expedited. He made it clear that neither he nor the A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC) side of the PAC, would support Teixeira’s request.
“Gail (Teixeira) wrote a letter, suggesting to the PAC that they shouldn’t give consideration for us combining the years 2019 and 2020. This has been occurring for several Chairmen past, even when Gail was a member of the PAC under Carl Greenidge. There was a merger of different years.”
“The Public Accounts Committee isn’t concerned about No-Confidence Motion and GECOM not holding elections. We deal primarily with the findings of the Auditor General’s report. And we’re saying, we’re way behind the work of the PAC and that is why the decisions would have been made for us to merge years… because there’s a backlog of work to be done,” Figueira said.
He, therefore, rebuffed Teixeira’s letter. Figueira was supported in this stance by fellow Opposition PAC members Ganesh Mahipaul and Juretha Fernandes, who went on to criticise the amending of the Standing Orders governing the PAC in April that resulted in a quorum for the holding of statutory meetings needing to include both Government and Opposition sides of the committee.
In her letter, Teixeira explained that the 2019 and 2020 fiscal years needed greater scrutiny than the rest. This is due to the fact that the then APNU/AFC Government was in office despite a No-Confidence Motion being passed against it in December 2018.

As such, Teixeira in her letter called for the 2019 and 2020 Auditor General reports being examined separately, rather than combining them. She referred to spending during those years as “aberrations” that were unconstitutional and did not meet the statutory requirements for spending public funds.
The Chief Whip argued, on behalf of the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) Government, several points as to why the two years cannot and must not be combined. She reminded that after the December 21, 2018 passage of the No-Confidence Motion (NCM) against the then Administration, the coalition regime was a “caretaker or interim” Government as determined by Guyana’s apex court, the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) in its June 2019 ruling that ascertained the successful passage of the motion.
Minister Teixeira went on to outline also that the APNU/AFC Government was in breach of the Guyana Constitution, which requires elections to be called within three months after the successful passage of the No-Confidence Motion.
“Despite the ruling of the CCJ in July 2019 that elections must be held within three months following this ruling (having been paused due to a series of litigation), elections were not held until March 2, 2020. In this period, the 2019 budget was executed with no oversight and scrutiny. Parliament was meeting in breach of the Constitution between January and May 2019,” she posited.
The Minister further stated, “There was no budget allocations or appropriation act approved by the National Assembly for the first nine months of the year of 2020. Therefore, monies were being withdrawn and spent without the authority of Parliament or oversight as required by the statutes.”