The Joint Sitting of the Parliament today continued the deliberations on the Public Accounts Committee’s (PAC) review report on the Annual Audit Report (AAR) 2021-22.

Deliberating on the Committee’s Review Report on Annual Audit Report 2021-22, the House voiced their concern on the reports of increasing unresolved financial irregularities, high attrition rate, high government debt, unresolved financial irregularities, underutilization of capital budget among many others and the need to look into resolving these issues.

The House endorsed all the 3 PAC’s recommendations and recommended:

1. the Royal Audit Authority (RAA) to review and decide on the unresolved irregularities of AAR 2021-2022 with the concerned agencies and submit a status report to PAC by the end of March 2024;

2. the Government and Royal Civil Service Commission (RCSC) to review the situation and take necessary corrective measures to improve the quality of service delivery and to mitigate the effects of increasing attrition rate of civil servants; and

3. the RCSC to review the effectiveness and relevance of Rules for Administrative Disciplinary Actions (RADA) considering some of the emerging challenges faced during the implementation of RADA.

   The PAC also recommended the House to incorporate the following 6 recommendations of the RAA for deliberation and endorsement:

1. Effective Internal control systems must be enforced and implemented throughout the agencies;

2. The Ministry of Finance should address the risk of assigning all access rights to a single user in implementing e-PEMS;

3. There is a need for greater integration of sectoral master plans with the National Five Year Plan through robust coordination;

4. Government should review the relevance of CSI Bank;

5. The Government should institute a robust credit appraisal system for Financial Service Providers; and

6. There is a need to have consistent rules and regulations to regulate entitlements besides enforcing strict implementation.

All the six recommendations were deliberated at length and endorsed by the House.

In total the Joint Sitting adopted the Public Accounts Committee’s twelve recommendations on the Annual Audit Report (AAR) 2021-22(9 recommendations) and the Follow up on the Review Reports of AAR 2010-21(3 recommendations) with 100% Yes votes from 67 Members present and voting.

The Speaker also declared tabling the Performance Audit Report on Preparedness for Cyber security and referred the report to PAC for review and to report to the Parliament.