September 23, 2002	Monday	Rajab 15, 1423

DHAKA, Sept 22: The Public Accounts Committee (PAC), the parliamentary watchdog of the government expenditure in Bangladesh, has not yet reviewed audit objections, raised by the Comptroller and Auditor General’s (CAG) office, worth Taka 21,000 crore (four billion dollars) since the country’s independence in 1971.

This was revealed in Dhaka on Friday by the Bangladesh chapter of the Paris based Transparency International, which has recently conducted a study on the activities of the CAG and the PAC.

The TIB report also said, a total of 770 audit reports were submitted to the President and the Parliament between July 1972 and July 2002. Of those, only 141 (18.3 per cent) were discussed by the PAC over the last 30 years. The rest 629 reports (81.7 per cent), with 16,085 audit objections, remained un-discussed.

The TIB researchers identified “old audit system, limitations of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Accounts and negligence of various government ministries” as the main reasons behind such a huge number of audit objections remaining unsettled.

The TIB report said that the ministries usually resorted to dilly-dallying tactics in responding to audit objections raised by the office of the CAG. There are instances where the ministries have not responded to audit objections for 12 to 16 years, although they are legally obliged to reply to such objections in 90 days of the completion of a report by the CAG, the TIB report added.