Earlier this week Parliament ended what history should remember as one of its more bizarre sittings.
A growing pandemic enveloped Viti Levu. Tens of thousands of people wondered how they would get their families through “containments” and the suspension of their work and small business.
But the Government’s agenda for Parliament seemed to say “coronavirus? What coronavirus?”
Hour upon hour of time was spent talking about outdated annual reports. I am not talking about 2018 and 2019 outdated. I am talking about 2013, 2014 and 2015.
Assistant Education Minister Joseph Nitya Nand, was an early casualty of our new, virtual Parliament. Spotted on camera receiving and slurping down a bilo of yaqona mid-session, he was admonished by Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum — and his brief assistant Ministerial career then came to an end.
The man has my sympathy. If I’d been forced to sit through a session of Ministerial droning on about the Review of the Audit Report of Municipal Councils for 2013 I too would have reached for that bilo, with both hands.
You can find the list of reports Government debated in the last two weeks on the Parliament website.
They are not just totally irrelevant to the emergency Fiji is facing. They are now totally irrelevant anyway.
The “Review Report of the Consolidated 2014 and 2015 Department of Forestry Annual Reports” was tabled in 2019.
The “Consolidated Report on the Review of the Tourism Fiji 2013 and 2014 Annual Reports” was also was tabled in 2019.
So reviews of reports that are already six years old, tabled two years ago, are now being debated by Parliament.
What is the point?
Being accountable
This is a government that, for the 15 long years that it has been around (constitutional or otherwise), has constantly harped on about “transparency and accountability”. Yet the evidence is that it ignores its basic elements.
Why do business executives prepare annual accounts and reports? It is not for decoration; there’s no profit in that.
First, it is to tell their shareholders (and others) what they have been doing for the past year, how well or badly they have done and why. Their shareholders want to know if they are worth the salaries and bonuses they are paid.
So they must be accountable.
Second, however, the information in the annual report should help them – and their owners – decide on the future direction of the business. It says, “these are the lessons we have learned, this is how we must adapt and change our business for the future”.
In the private sector, if it took you seven years to report back on your performance, you wouldn’t have a job. Your replacement would be doing it.
A seven-year-old report is useless – except perhaps for debating points. The whole world – including your competition – has moved on.
This should be no different for a Government reporting to its stakeholders – that is the taxpayers who pay their wages.
It beggars belief that there are departments and organisations through the Government system, who seem unable to produce annual reports anywhere close to on time.
Basic accountability is critical to their work. If they can’t promptly summarise and report on their own performance, what on earth are they doing?
So, even without a deadly virus raging outside its door, the whole Parliamentary debate on these reports was of little use.
Performance audits
It is not easy to talk about auditing and to keep people interested. The exceptions may be auditors themselves and their more excitable clients.
It seems that Mr Sayed-Khaiyum must now fall into the latter group. At stake is the issue of “performance audits”. The Audit Act (now more than 50 years old), sets out the role of the Auditor-General and the task he (it’s currently a he) has to perform.
As you would expect, he looks over the accounts of Government departments and authorities. He makes sure they have kept their books well, spent public money as required and protected against fraud or abuse.
Of course every year the Auditor-General’s report comes out detailing the myriad cases where this has not happened. It generally makes fascinating reading if you are interested in how the Government works (or in these cases how it doesn’t work).
But in 2006 a new section was put into the Audit Act, section 6A. Essentially what this law says is “the Auditor-General is not just entitled to look at the books and see if the money was properly spent”.
“The Auditor-General is also entitled to look at how well the Government has used its money and whether it has done that efficiently or not.”
This is of course the question that always bugs me when I hear speeches from Government Ministers about the impressive-sounding hundreds of millions being spent on roads, education and health. Yet our roads are full of potholes. Our kids are failing basic maths and science in huge numbers. And our health services – well let’s just not go there right now. So surely it is important that someone look into how efficiently our money was being spent.
SDGs and all that
What seems to have upset Mr Sayed-Khaiyum was the Auditor-General’s impressively-titled “Performance Audit of Preparedness for the Implementation of Sustainable Development Goals”.
The so-called “SDGs” are targets set by the United Nations for improving humanity’s quality of life. End poverty and hunger. Ensure health, clean water, gender equality, decent work. That sort of thing.
Governments are supposed to work towards these goals. The Auditor-General is required by the SDG principles to look at how well the Government is doing making the SDGs happen. So he issued a performance audit report.
The illustration on the page sets out the Auditor-General’s opinion on how the Government is doing. 35 is the top mark. The Government doesn’t get any top marks, although in some activities (“integration into national context”) it seems to come close.
The Auditor-General thinks that the Government is also doing well at “mobilizing partnerships”. Given the Government’s catastrophic failure to do so during the current crisis, I wonder – but the Auditor-General did the audit, not me.
The Government scores near zero on “communication to stakeholders” (ie us). Most of us, noting the Government’s nearly-zero communication with us on the coronavirus crisis, will find some grim affirmation in that. Generally the report has the sort of criticisms you would expect of Third World governments (as Fiji’s government undoubtedly is).
Ministries haven’t lined up their strategic plans and laws to match the SDGs; they don’t tell Parliament what’s going on; and the national “SDG Taskforce” doesn’t meet very often. That kind of thing.
Unfortunately for the Auditor-General the “implementing agency” of the SDGs is Mr Sayed-Khaiyum’s Economy Ministry. So these criticisms are clearly too much. In Parliament this week Mr Sayed-Khaiyum demanded “transparency” from the Auditor-General on when the Government would be audited. That seems odd. Shouldn’t the Government be ready for an audit at any time?
The Auditor-General, Mr Sayed-Khaiyum complained, “is not entitled to question the merits of the policy objectives of the Government”.
Doing his job
Well, that is what the law says. But that’s not what the Auditor-General is doing here. The Auditor-General is doing his job. He is saying “you people in the Government are supposed to be implementing the SDGs. That’s your policy objective. But here are the ones you are not doing very well”.
And that is exactly what a performance audit is supposed to do. An open, transparent government would welcome an independent review of how it performs. It would say “OK, looks like we haven’t done well on this score and that score. How do we fix it?”
Because that’s what auditors do and that’s their value. Just about anyone who is audited will grumble that the auditor got this or that wrong. They may sometimes even be right.
But the value of an audit is that someone is looking at you from outside your bubble and measuring you against a standard that is different from your own.
If you own and manage your own business and you make mistakes or are inefficient, that’s your problem. You bear the losses. But Government is different. It is a huge, complicated business, managed by a few people on behalf of all of us. So it is particularly important that those who manage the government listen to the criticisms.
They need also to accept that openness and transparency requires that criticism must be made public. Those are the rules of the game.
So let’s hear it for the auditors – and the Auditor-General.
And let’s hope he is left alone to do his job and tell the people of Fiji the things that Government doesn’t necessarily want you to hear.
- RICHARD NAIDU is a Suva lawyer whose law firm does some work for The Fiji Times (and listens carefully to what its auditors have to say). The views in this article are not necessarily the views of this newspaper.
