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Parliament to Discuss Strategy for Faster Accountability Processes
The Deputy Speaker of Parliament, Thomas Tayebwa, has said that the Business Committee of Parliament will discuss a strategy to effectively handle reports from the Auditor General within the Accountability Committees.
According to Tayebwa, the government can only implement the Auditor General’s recommendations if they have been adopted by Parliament. However, these reports often take a long time to be approved by the House.
“If you wait for four or five years to approve a report, how will you process a Treasury Memorandum, which is an action-taken report? But you can make a subcommittee out of a committee to scrutinize projects or MDAs. When you adopt as a committee, you come here and we debate,” said Tayebwa.
The Deputy Speaker made the statement while chairing a plenary sitting on Tuesday.
This followed a proposal by Kira Municipality MP, Ibrahim Ssemujju, who suggested that the Auditor General’s report should be expeditiously adopted by the House before further investigations are conducted by Parliament Committees.
“We have been treating the Auditor General’s report as raw material for committees to do work. In other jurisdictions like Kenya, the report of the Auditor General is adopted as it comes, then committees request to do further investigations in specific areas,” Ssemujju noted.
Sarah Opendi, the Tororo District Woman Representative, raised concerns about the constitutional provisions for handling the Auditor General’s reports by Parliament and the time allocated to House Committees to address the business.
“The Constitution says we must consider them within six months. Now, if within six months the committee is only given two or three months to handle these reports, and you have about 400 or so entities, how can we effectively handle them and conclude business?” Opendi asked.
The Deputy Speaker noted that the work of the Standing Committees, which scrutinize the Auditor General’s report, was halted to allow legislators to prioritize business timelines for handling the Budget Framework Paper (BFP).
“But now that the Budget Committee has already started receiving committee reports for the BFP, we hope to conclude by next week. On the issue of time, I think it is something we shall go back and discuss administratively,” Tayebwa added.
In his communication to the House during the sitting, Tayebwa also said that the Auditor General was urged to carry out value-for-money audits and special audits to produce a more comprehensive report for Parliament’s consideration.
This, he noted, will go beyond the scope of financial audits and provide more details on issues like mischarge and value for money.
“If you said you did one kilometre at 1 billion Shillings in Masaka, how come a neighbouring district like Lyantonde is doing it at 500 million Shillings? It is the same landscape, the same conditions, but you are not getting value on one side. Accountability committees must now dig much deeper,” said Tayebwa.
He also urged the Accountability Committees to become stricter on the Accounting Officers of institutions, noting that only 31 percent of parliamentary recommendations made while adopting the Auditor General’s report for the financial year 2023/2024 were implemented.
Additionally, 35 percent of these recommendations were partially implemented, whereas 34 percent were not implemented at all.
The latest Auditor General’s report for 2024 was tabled on the floor of Parliament on Tuesday for scrutiny by the Accountability Committees.