By Lorraine Wohi
The office of Auditor General has reported a large percentage of state entities including Provincial entities have not submitted their financial statements for audit, which some lasting for seven to eight years of waiting.
The Auditor General Gordon Kega said the non-submission of financial statements by the public bodies within the legislative time-frame remains a big issue.
“Without financial statements prepared by the entities, we cannot commence out audits” Kega said.
“There is no penalty or consequence for this non-submission of the required financial statements as there is no legal body in place to refer the entity and senior officers for civil and administrative review.”
He added that the ability to improve public administration is difficult when the audit funding his office is raising with the entities are from several years ago.
“This means we are not seeing improvements in the preparation of the financial statements that we would like,” he said. “The lack of timely oversight for the public funds that are provided at the sub-national level is of high concern to me.”
“He also mentioned that OAG needed more resource capacity to conduct backlog of audits that needs to be completed each year.
“This is an impossible workload for the approximately 110 auditors in my office,” Kega said.
He said the PNG government allocated a substantial amount of its funds to the provincial governments and there was presently no independent assurance that the government activities carried out in the provinces and districts are properly accounted for and consistent with the Parliaments intentions.
He also highlighted that some of the challenges faced by the sub-national team.
The challenges include; keeping track of the various entities and contact details for the large number of entities that are established in the provinces and Districts.
The audit of the District Improvements were added to our workload without consideration for the resourcing and funding pressures in the office.
The quality of financial statements required by the regional entitles is often not to require standard. Due to decentralization, every sub0-national entity is occupied doing every aspect on an entities administration, and they often have no training in preparing financial statements.
There are around 1500 audits that are mandate to be done each year.
This includes: Public accounts of PNG, 42 national departments, 21 provincial governments and 20 hospital boards, 321 local-level governments, 432 service improvements plans, 487 statutory authorities and 155 business arms.