Where is the money?
The government and the public may have been on different pages when it came to the so-called forensic audits that have been launched into a number of government agencies. There has been a sense of frustration that the audits have not produced the sort of evidence that satisfies the expectations of the public.
This frustration is being caused because of the differences in how the government perceived the audits as against what the public expected.
The public saw these audits as aiding the government in obtaining evidence to jail persons who had committed acts of corruption. The public wanted persons connected with the previous administration to be jailed for what the public believed was widespread corruption.
The government on the other hand has used these audits as a means of assessing the quality of the systems within the institutions they inherited. The government wanted to see what sort of accountability they inherited.
There has therefore been a difference between what the government hopes to achieve by these audits and what the public expects. This has been the source of the frustration.
The audits have been highly controversial. They have been viewed by the political opposition, which commands the support of almost half of the population, as a witch-hunt against members of the previous administration. It is seen by the opposition as a means of purging the public administrative system of persons who are not favoured by the present government.
The publication of the audits has created some additional problems. It seems as if in many cases, those who were indicted by the audits have not been given a chance to respond to the audit findings. In many cases also, it would seem that the results of some of the audits would have been different had those fingered in certain actions been accorded, during the audits, the opportunity to explain their actions.
This seems to be a major grouse and shortcoming of many of the audits.
There will be cases where persons will not cooperate because of how they perceive the audits. But surely there has to be an element for fairness involved and persons should have been allowed, in many instances, to explain the actions they took in particular situations.
Some of the findings of the audits are highly questionable. In one instance an auditor took to constitutional interpretation to accuse a former minister of the previous government of wrongdoing. Anyone can hold an opinion on the interpretation of the Constitution, but a constitutional offence is not necessarily a criminal offence, and no one has asked whether in that specific instance, the constitution itself creates an offence.
In other instances, officers fingered for alleged wrongdoing in audits have given explanations that have discredited some of the audit findings. These things would not have happened if the responses, if any, of the officers to the charges leveled against them were noted in the audit reports.
It was careless of the government to have published the results of the audits without first affording those involved with an opportunity to give an explanation. The publication of the audits has been unfair to those who were denied this opportunity.
In one instance, the auditor discredited an audit done by the Audit Office on the basis of a general conflict of interest within the Audit Office.
There is no explanation as to how this conflict of interest has specifically affected the findings of the particular audit of the agency concerned by the Audit Office, and how those findings would have been different had the conflict of interest not been present. These sorts of findings have made the forensic audits highly controversial.
No government department is going to have perfect systems, and if the benchmark is that any and every indiscretion is punishable, then the findings of the audits will become more frightening, because not all poor systems are the result of corruption.
The public saw these audits as means of determining who stole money, how much money was stolen and where the stolen monies can be found.
Instead of answers to these questions, the public is being provided with findings which could have been unearthed by any internal audit department rather than the costly process of having to engage private forensic audits.