Editorial | Protecting taxpayers’ money

In the din of the election campaign, the report of a small, but significant, development for accountability and good governance might have escaped attention.

Last week, Kasan Troupe, the top civil servant at the education ministry, announced that the ministry’s appropriation account report for the 2024-25 fiscal year had already been filed with the finance ministry and the accountant general (AuG).

The law requires that within four months after the end of the fiscal year, government ministries, departments and agencies lodge these appropriation statements, showing how they spent monies voted for them by Parliament. This provides the basis for the AuG’s office to audit the accounts.

Given that the fiscal year ends on March 31, these statements are due by the end of July. In that context, and all things being equal, there ought to be nothing special about the education ministry having submitted its reports at this time.

Except that the MDAs are mostly late – years late. Moreover, as the auditor general often complains, what is presented is often inadequate. And the education ministry is among the worst offenders.

Indeed, Dr Troupe celebrated that it was “for the first time since 2012” that the ministry’s appropriations accounts were on time.

STILL BEHIND

In her report for the 2023-24 fiscal year – submitted to Parliament at the end of 2024, the auditor general, Pamela Monroe Ellis – noted that despite making strides clearing its backlog of accounts, the education ministry was still behind by several years.

After the end of the last fiscal year, the ministry submitted nine appropriations accounts, covering four fiscal years – 2012-13 to 2015-16. That meant another 14 reports, relating to six fiscal years, were outstanding.

This failure of government bodies to file these reports, or to do so on time, isn’t mere formality, to be taken lightly. It is a critical process by which public officials are supposed to account for how they handle taxpayers’ money, similar to the way firms are required to deliver audited accounts, showing how they utilised shareholders’ resources.

And with government ministries, the amounts to be accounted for aren’t peanuts. For instance, during the years (2015-17 to 2023-24) for which the education ministry’s accounts were still backlogged, Parliament allocated approximately J$730 billion, or nearly 14 per cent of the Government’s budgeted expenditure for the six-year period, to that ministry.

It is, however, not only the education ministry where this failure to adhere to the requirements of the Financial Administration and Audit Act (FAAA) exists. It happens across the Government. Indeed, last year, when the good governance NGO, Jamaica Accountability Meter Portal (JAMP), totted up the amounts for which appropriations accounts were outstanding, the total was more than J$3 trillion.

POSTER CHILD

Even before JAMP’s intervention, the health ministry has become the poster child, of sorts, for failing to follow the rules because of the defiant posture of its former permanent secretary, Dunstan Bryan, towards the auditor general at hearings of Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on the issue.

Mr Bryan first clashed with Ms Monroe Ellis in 2023 over her criticism of what she determined to be weak procurement arrangements for J$600 million of spending by the health ministry, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The health ministry argued that it had to act in an emergency. Mr Bryan branded that report as sub-par.

Last year, he complained again when the auditor general highlighted expenditure of over J$700 billion, going back more than a decade, for which the health ministry didn’t submit appropriations reports. He felt that his ministry was unfairly singled out for a systemic problem across the Government, grounded significantly in too few qualified accounting staff in ministries.

Up to the time of the auditor general’s latest report, the health ministry had outstanding accounts, going back to 2013-14, for J$829.6 billion, or 10.8 per cent of the national budget over the 11 fiscal years.

The ministry did, in December 2023, submit 15 of the outstanding 21 accounts for the period, but according to the auditor general, “these accounts did not meet the standards for submission as outlined” in the FAAA and the Government’s financial regulations.

The health ministry undertook to fully clear the backlog by March of this year and was to hire outside auditing help to get the job done. It is, however, not clear whether that was accomplished.

What the absence of the appropriations account means is an absence of serious examination of whether that vast amount of money was spent on things for which it was allocated, or if the spending was efficient. The longer it takes for these audits to be done, the more likely it is for information to be lost or for things to be lost between the cracks.

Or, as Ms Monroe Ellis observed in her report, regarding the education ministry: “The delay in the submission of the appropriation accounts undermines good governance practice as it denies Parliament, the citizens of Jamaica and the MoFPS (Ministry of Finance and the Public Service) timely information to make strategic decisions on the implementation of the (education ministry’s) approved budgets, as well as to hold the management accountable for the use of public resources.”

Ensuring that these matters are put right must be among the first orders of business of the new administration after the September 3 general election.