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Sunday, January 25, 2015

National auditors to be free of civil service for greater competency, says PAC chief

Public Accounts Committee chairman Datuk Nur Jazlan Mohamed says the National Audit Department needs to hire more professionals to improve on its competency. – The Malaysian Insider file pic, January 25, 2015.Public Accounts Committee chairman Datuk Nur Jazlan Mohamed says the National Audit Department needs to hire more professionals to improve on its competency. – The Malaysian Insider file pic, January 25, 2015.
The National Audit Department, which produces the Auditor-General's (AG) Report, is on the path to becoming a commission, freeing it from the conditions of the civil service to make it more competent in checking public spending, Public Accounts Committee (PAC) chairman Datuk Nur Jazlan Mohamed said.
The proposal to turn the department into a commission had come from the Auditor-General himself, so that it would not be tied to the rules and regulations of the Public Service Department (PSD), Nur Jazlan revealed.
This means it would be able to hire professional accountants and pay them the appropriate wages.
"I welcome it and it should be expedited," he said, adding that it would allow the government auditors to function more competently and to meet higher standards of transparency requested by taxpayers.
He said currently, the audit department's hands were tied to a large extent because it could not hire its own staff, especially professional accounting staff.
"I have been told that the whole audit department only has four or five professional accountants. Professionals with ACCA (Association of Chartered Certified Accountants) qualification are scarce.
"The government system also does not recognise professional accountants... it regards them as mere degree holders and puts them on the same pay scale, which is lower than what their fellow accountants are making in the private sector.
"If the department cannot attract professional accountants to join, it cannot improve on its competency," Nur Jazlan, a Barisan Nasional MP, said.
He added the audit department also needed to improve its processes, including how it produced and wrote the A-G's reports.
He cited the A-G's report on the controversial Youth Day celebrations in 2012 that saw the federal government pay RM1.6 million to bring three K-Pop groups to perform at the event. He said the report failed to take into account the RM20 million the government had received from sponsors for the event.
Another example, he said, was the 2012 A-G's report on the Broadcasting Department spending RM3,810 for “branded” wall clocks, which was picked up by the media.
"The report lumped together the costs for all the clocks purchased by the broadcasting department, including the much more expensive atomic clocks, which are used as primary standards for international time distribution services, to control the wave frequency of television broadcasts, and in global navigation satellite systems.
"So, the totalled up cost to buy clocks as shown in the report was high. So here we have a question on the quality of the A-G's Report, which obviously needs improvement to prevent future misconceptions.
"This is not the way things should be done. The audit department has to come up to the level of commercial audit standards. The level of competency and the quality of its reports and staff must be higher so the people can truly rely on what the department reports," he said.
On Friday night, Jazlan, who is also Pulai MP, was a panellist at the "Auditor-General's Report: Government Audit-Formality or Accountability?" forum organised by the Penang Institute at Wawasan Open University in Penang.
At the event, Penang Institute director Steven Sim Chee Keong suggested that the audit department should be made fully independent and put under the Parliament, instead of the executive, since it scrutinised public spending.
He also said anyone, or at least the MPs, should be able to request the A-G to investigate government bodies for the sake of public interest.
Sim, who is also Bukit Mertajam MP, lamented that currently, lawmakers in Parliament, including Nur Jazlan, had no power to request or instruct the A-G to act.
He had said this in relation to Nur Jazlan's remark at the forum that there was no fresh basis for the PAC to probe the accounts of 1MDB, since the strategic development fund's books had already been cleared by an international auditing firm.
"Just because a big government organisation like 1MDB (1Malaysia Development Bhd) had been audited by a foreign firm, it should not mean that the audit department need not have to look into it as well," Sim had argued.
Sim also called for the audit department's power to be expanded to allow it to start investigations on government departments, government-linked corporations and public private partnerships (PPP), as well as on Official Secrets Act-protected schemes.
Nur Jazlan said the A-G himself had confirmed that the international firm which checked 1MDB's accounts had auditors who were more skilled and competent than the National Audit Department's staff to look into the accounts of the government-owned fund, which involved money kept overseas.
"This is why there is an issue with the department's level of competence. While I agree with Sim that it will be good to put the department directly under the Parliament, we cannot put the cart before the horse.
"The first thing to do is to get the department to increase its competence by letting it hire quality professionals and paying them accordingly, and improving its processes."
Nur Jazlan said the department must be further strengthened for it to do its job more efficiently. He believed the department was headed in that direction with the proposal to convert it into a commission.
- TMI

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