Five Years at Once Is Not Accountability

592GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

 Five Years at Once Is Not Accountability

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OPINION BY : Hem Kumar October 2026

Guyana’s Public Accounts Committee must audit backward—not bundle five years of public money into one convenient blur.

This is not a technical quarrel over committee procedure. It concerns whether Guyana’s Parliament can still compel ministers, permanent secretaries, regional officials, and heads of state agencies to account, year by year, for public funds entrusted to them.

A backlog cannot justify a blackout

Guyana’s audit lag is real and serious. The PAC has historically fallen years behind in examining the Auditor General’s reports; in 2022, it was still dealing with reports from 2017 and 2018. Former Auditor General Anand Goolsarran has warned that a strictly sequential approach could leave the PAC five to six years in arrears, and has proposed that the full committee examine the latest 2024 accounts while a sub-committee handles the backlog years.

That is a rational response to a backlog. What is not rational is to collapse five separate audit years into a single, simultaneous examination without first establishing how responsibility, evidence, and remedial action will be assigned.

Each Auditor General report is not merely a collection of observations. It is a record of what happened in a particular fiscal year: which contracts were paid, which vouchers were missing, which advances were uncleared, which revenues were not banked, and which accounting officers failed to respond. If those years are merged without a disciplined structure, the public may never know precisely when a breach occurred, who authorized it, who benefited, and whether anyone was held accountable.

The recurring red flags

The case against a careless five-year merger becomes stronger when one examines the kinds of findings that recur across Guyana’s public accounts.

Missing vouchers and undocumented spending

The 2024 report found that auditors could not verify 120 payment vouchers worth G$877.2 million because supporting documentation was unavailable. The Ministry of Human Services and Social Security accounted for nearly G$700 million of that amount, while Region Three had G$127.8 million in missing voucher documentation and Region Ten had G$56.3 million.

This is not a new category of problem. Missing or unpresented vouchers, unsupported payments, and incomplete records have repeatedly appeared in audit reporting and PAC proceedings. If the PAC examines 2020 to 2024 together, an agency could claim that records were later located or systems improved—without ever explaining why public money was spent in a prior year without adequate documentation.

The essential question is not simply: “Has the record been produced now?” It is: “Who spent the money, on what authority, and why was the evidence absent when the Auditor General required it?”

Contractor overpayments

The 2024 audit examined 829 contracts worth G$48.19 billion and identified G$1.011 billion in overpayments on measured works under 86 contracts administered by ministries and regional administrations. Government has said those sums were subsequently recovered, but recovery does not erase the underlying control failure.

Overpayments are particularly dangerous in a five-year combined review because they invite a misleading narrative: “The money was recovered, so the matter is closed.” That is insufficient. The PAC must establish whether the overpayment was an isolated error, a pattern of weak supervision, inflated measurements, defective procurement, or collusion. It must also ask why the overpayment occurred in the first place and which officers allowed it.

Stale cheques and unspent balances

The Auditor General has repeatedly flagged agencies retaining cheques beyond the permitted period, failing to pay unspent balances into the Consolidated Fund, keeping cash books open too long, and drawing or backdating cheques to exhaust budgetary allocations. These practices distort the true financial position of the state and can conceal money that should have been returned to the public purse.

A five-year simultaneous review could allow an agency to say: “The cheque has since been cleared,” or “The balance has since been surrendered.” But the public deserves to know whether the delay was negligent, deliberate, or part of a broader effort to manipulate budget execution.

Drugs, medical supplies, and weak reconciliation

Audit reporting has repeatedly raised concerns over the procurement, distribution, and reconciliation of drugs and medical supplies. In a sector where shortages can affect patient care and where billions may pass through stores and distribution systems, weak reconciliation is not a minor administrative matter.

If five years are reviewed together, the committee must not accept a generalized assurance that “systems have improved.” It must trace specific years, specific stores, specific suppliers, and specific reconciliations. Otherwise, the public will be left with a vague conclusion that something went wrong somewhere, sometime, without a clear account of the loss or risk.

The central question

There is one question that cuts through every justification for this proposal:

If this were their personal money—their salaries, their business accounts, their family’s savings—would they accept an accountant or auditor saying, “Let us not examine 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 separately; let us put all five years together and see what we can sort out”?

They would not.

No prudent person managing private funds would allow five years of transactions to be merged into one review, especially where there were missing receipts, unexplained payments, contractor overcharges, stale cheques, and unreconciled inventories. They would demand a year-by-year account, named responsibility, documentary proof, and a clear statement of what was lost, recovered, or written off.

Public money deserves no lesser standard. Indeed, it deserves a higher one, because it belongs not to a minister, a permanent secretary, or a governing party, but to the citizens of Guyana.

The danger of “efficiency”

Efficiency is a legitimate objective. A committee that spends years on one audit report while newer reports accumulate is failing in its constitutional duty. But efficiency cannot become the excuse for superficiality.

The PAC’s task is not merely to “complete” reports. Its task is to examine them, test explanations, demand documents, identify recurring weaknesses, recommend corrective action, and where necessary refer matters for further investigation. A process that clears the calendar but leaves unanswered questions has not cleared the backlog; it has merely relocated it into a larger, less accountable pile.

The reported proposal has already provoked concern that merging several years of reports could undermine the committee’s ability to require accounting officers to account year by year. That concern should be taken seriously, particularly at a time when the 2024 report itself identifies continuing weaknesses in procurement, record-keeping, accountability, and oversight.

A better structure

The PAC can still move quickly without sacrificing rigor. It should adopt a rolling, thematic, backward-tracing model:

♦  Begin with 2024. The latest report should set the agenda because it identifies current weaknesses and unresolved carry-over matters.

♦ Examine by sector, not by page count. Group procurement, health, regions, revenue, statutory bodies, and cash management into distinct review streams.

♦ Trace recurring findings backward. For every major 2024 finding, determine whether the same issue appeared in 2023, 2022, 2021, or 2020, and identify the first year it emerged.

♦  Require separate annual accountability. Each accounting officer must answer separately for each fiscal year, even where the committee groups hearings by theme.

♦  Create a public findings register. Record the agency, audit year, finding, amount, responsible officer, status, corrective action, deadline, and PAC conclusion.

♦ Use AI to organize, not to excuse. AI can extract findings, match recurring issues, rank agencies by cumulative exposure, and prepare hearing briefs. But every conclusion must be verified against the original audit record.

This approach would allow Parliament to catch up without allowing the past to be quietly folded into the present.

What must not be accepted

The PAC should reject any process that permits:

♦ A single blanket response covering five audit years.

♦ A later correction being used to erase responsibility for an earlier breach.

♦  Missing vouchers being treated as resolved merely because they eventually appear.

♦  Recovered overpayments being treated as proof that the system worked.

♦  Recurring failures being described as “historical” without identifying the officers responsible.

♦  Recommendations remaining unimplemented from one audit year to the next.

The 2024 report found that only 27 percent of the 179 recommendations arising from the 2023 report had been fully implemented. That figure alone should make the committee wary of any structure that makes implementation harder to track.

The public interest

Guyana is entering an era of vastly larger budgets, major infrastructure spending, expanding extractive revenues, and growing state activity. The stakes of public financial control have never been higher. A PAC that cannot distinguish 2020 from 2024, or that allows five years of findings to be answered in one blurred process, will not be equipped to protect the public purse.

The committee should not be judged by how quickly it declares the backlog closed. It should be judged by whether it can say, with evidence: this money was spent lawfully; this officer was responsible; this loss was recovered; this person was disciplined; and this weakness will not recur.

Until then, “examining five years together” should be viewed not as reform, but as a warning.