Audit Department wants powers to confiscate plundered funds and arrest erring officials;
Auditor General of Pakistan Rana Asad Amin on Monday said that Audit Department wanted to ink a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with National Accountability Bureau (NAB) to make the audit more effective and ensure speedy legal action against the erring officials or institutions.
Talking to media after addressing the launch ceremony of a 20-day 97th International Intensive Training Programme in Performance Auditing at a local hotel, he said that workload on the NAB and the FIA (Federal Investigation Agency) could substantially be reduced provided the Audit department was given the powers of arresting the corrupt officials and confiscation of the plundered funds.
He elaborated that at present, the Audit Department could not do anything other than prove documental misappropriation of funds or charges and report to the relevant departmental secretaries as well as the Public Accounts Committee, which too delayed the matter by discussing it after two years.
The auditor general said that he had also visited Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Sindh provinces and met the respective chief ministers to discuss the matter regarding undue delay of five years in resolving the audit paras. He said that he had suggested to both the CMs to expedite this processes by sorting out the audit objections within one year. He added that now the public accounts committees of these provinces were performing more actively to finish up the pending work.
Auditor General of Pakistan mentioned that earlier, the performance audit was focused on small institutions such as school and hospitals, but this time “following the direction of Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif, we will be conducting performance audit even at the ministry level”.
Auditor General of Pakistan would assess the ministries and institutions and find out to what extent they achieved their set targets on various fronts, he said, asserting that an overall audit report would also be compiled for discussion in the cabinet and the parliament.
Amin said that now every ministry would have to perform in the best way and to give positive results.
Earlier in his address, the AGP said that the Audit Department had imparted performance audit training to 330 officers from 33 countries since 1981.
He said that 22 audit officers from seven countries including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal and Turkey would be part of the 97th training programme.
The auditor general said that the Audit Wing of Pakistan had earned international recognition for its commitment, professionalism and well-designed training modules.
