Continuing Wastage of Public Funds

Editorial

National Audit Office’s Report

The report of the National Audit Officefor the fiscal year 2020-21 is out. As in past years, it has again drawn attention to a long catalogue of considerable waste of public funds in diverse ministries and parastatal bodies. Accordingly, huge amounts have gone missing, misappropriated or down the drains; systems have been bypassed to draw unjustified advantages, while loss has been occasioned in other places due to dereliction of duty and absence of adequate follow-up on projects.

No doubt, more or other such cases will be uncovered in coming years given the absence of a proper accountability mechanism to put a stop to the perpetuation of wasted public funds and sanction those responsible. There will be shock and consternation at the abuses pointed out. They will be picked up again by the Public Accounts Committee and commented upon adversely and the public will keep treating it as an unacceptable occurrence over which there will be no sanction. In the meantime, consumers and taxpayerswill keep contributing by paying up all sorts of taxes to fill the coffers of the Treasury.

It must be understood that the job of auditors is to draw attention to flaws in the system and not to implement remedial action still less to impose sanctions. If this sort of thing had been happening in a private firm, in the majority of cases, the shareholders/directors would be taking the immediate appropriate redress actions in the light of the audit report to stop hurting the firm’s interests. In the case of the public sector, it is the efficiency of the government’s revenue collection and its spending that call the attention of the National Audit Office (NAO). In this case, it is for the top civil servants to pick up the points raised by the NAO, analyse the flaws that give rise to shortcomings (in the case of revenue collections) and abuses (in the case of expenses undertaken or not undertaken on time or undertaken in such a manner as to result in wastefulexpenditures).

The initiative for proposing corrective actions should come from the top civil servants who should implement them unless not endorsed explicitly by the Ministers. This implies of course that those top rungs do not themselves share responsibility in such failures and do not try to shelter themselves or pass the buck around.

The procedure is more or less the same in the case of parastatal bodies, except that in these cases, the corrective action proposed by the public servants employed by those institutions has to be endorsed by the boards of the parastatal bodies. In such cases, the Minister comes in but not as directly as it is the case in central government. Thus, the boards of parastatals are more prone to abusive decisions particularly when the President or Chairperson is appointed by and feared to enjoy close proximity with political powers. It is not unusual then for presidents of boards of parastatal bodies to act abusively by giving the impression to their fellow board members that they would be acting with the approval of the concerned ministers.

So, what does one do? Go on piling up annual audit reports, even if they draw attention to aggravating cases of abuses, a few hundred millions ten or twenty years ago and running into billions nowadays? Accept the reproaches of malpractices to which attention is being drawn as if they were matters of routine? Business as usual? There was a time not so far back when every head and every department coming up for Audit scrutiny would work overtime to ensure that matters had been properly handled. Where have we slipped up?

All this is very distant from Singapore, which is understood to be the place whose good practices we are hoping to model ourselves on. Action is therefore called for to arrest the waste of public funds, all the more shocking in tough times when every penny should be spent wisely. Action can only be taken effectively if the responsibility for seeing to it that what ought to be done correctly is laid down specifically on the shoulders of clearly identifiable individuals. So long as a certain vagueness is entertained by hierarchical structures on who exactly should be held to account if things misfire, it will be impossible to stop abuses in the public sector.

We have had enough of this and it is time to give direction as to how things will be in the future before the money of the public is directed to a wasteful employment. We are fed up with lack of ownership and responsibility for decisions, which only creates a nefarious culture of impunity which the public sector as a whole should reject. Unless they have forgotten the myth of the Augean stables where the King’s 3000 head of cattle were reportedly housed in a large comfy barn but where for 30 years the dung was not daily cleaned and piled up. With the job of cleaning the stables having been put off for 30 years, it was deemed an impossible job to clean them. Let us not wait for a minority of people to distort processes or objectives without the certainty that some proportionate sanction would be applied.

It should be made clear right from the beginning as to who picks up the buck when things go wrong. Where timely decisions have not been taken, resulting in wasteful public expenditures or unwarranted escalation of costs or preference being selectively given in the attribution of contracts to wheeler-dealers and cronies,the ultimate decision-maker of the process should be clearly identifiable. It is when exemplary sanctions are made to apply actually that the tide of abuse will start being stemmed. Lawmakers have to explicitly set down severe sanctions to follow for deliberate slippage in the execution of public duties.

It should also be made clear to persons being appointed to the governing bodies of parastatals that their liability for wrongful actions and/or decisions will not be limited in time and sanctions/disqualification from holding any public office/directorships in future should form part of the set of corrective actions to be taken. Top civil servants know full well that they can’t just blame a verbal instruction, pressure or seduction by the political brass; all they need to do is minute accordingly in the decision file, protecting themselves and the public funds or interest if they sense any untoward decision.

It is high time to stop the intolerable drift and prevent the rot from spreading so far and deep that even Heracles would lose his fabled powers.

* Published in ePaper 1 April 2022