MDAS urged to embrace public accountability

THE chairman, Public Accounts Committee of the House of Representatives, Kingsley Chinda, has emphasized the need for Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAS) of government to embrace accountability and integrity in their mandate to serve the people. He made this known during the Port Harcourt leg of the ongoing National Workshop on Audit Queries, Responses and Resolutions: “The ABC of Audit Queries and Defence before Public Account Committee of the House of Representatives, organized with the 8th Assembly, Public Accounts Committee,(pac) House of Representatives in collaboration with the Office of the Auditor-general for the Federation (OAUGF) and Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN).

Chinda, who was the keynote speaker at the event said his experience at PAC hearing and the way MDAS react whenever they are invited to defend their audit queries, as if they are being persecuted, underscores the importance of the workshop. The lawmaker representing Obio/akpor Federal Constituency in the House of Representatives, said PAC, office for the Auditor General of the Federation and MDAS are all partners in progress and MDAS should not always carry the toga of defense as if they are being persecuted, each time they are invited to respond to queries regarding their finances, saying the invitation is just to set the records straight.

Chinda however enumerated some of the challenges of committees to include “dumping of manual and huge volume of documents few days before hearing on PAC, by the MDAS, failure of Chief Accounting Officers (CAOS) of the MDAS to appear before the committee, improper documentation, including missing vouchers and tax receipts, lack of articulation on the part of CAOS and failures of some MDAS to submit audited financial report to the Accountant General of the Federation” amongst others. He nevertheless said that his committee is bracing up to the challenges with the introduction, in the next couple of months, of dedicated website where MDAS can log-on and download their audit queries and upload their responses, such that audit defense would be mechanized as “pen and paper technology will be consigned to history”.

On his part, the Technical Consultant to the Public Accounts Committee, House of Representatives, and a past Chairman of ICAN, Lagos Mainland, Dr. Greg Ezeilo, emphasized the importance of the programme as a platform to educate the MDAS on the rudiments of audit queries and defence before the PAC. Greg who is the lead organizer of the programme, explained that resolving audit queries with MDAS by committees of the National Assembly has been greatly controverted largely due to perception gaps on the part of the MDAS.