ISLAMABAD, July 28: The government has decided to drastically improve weak functions of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) to speed up the accountability process aimed at preventing corrupt practices in the public sector organizations.
Official sources told Dawn here on Wednesday that the World Bank had promised necessary financial and technical assistance to improve ineffective PAC functions. The main purpose is to better the weak administrative process so that executives of the State sector could be held responsible for the poor management of public finances.
The sources said that for the first time any international donor agency would be greatly supporting the PAC to initiate a timely, comprehensive and methodical review of audit reports of the Audit-General of Pakistan.
The government agreed with the World Bank that Pakistan's public expenditures have long been tainted by poor financial management practices which required new public accounting and integrated financial management system at the federal, provincial and district levels to modernize public audit functions.
Pakistan was told to adopt internationally-accepted good governance practices for achieving timely and well informed legislative process to better manage public funds by executives of public enterprises.
The objective, the sources said, was to ensure immediate review of all significant audit reports through continuously active PAC with no backlogs or pending audit reports.
The government is expected to ensure adequate public disclosures of PAC findings and timely action on material observations and the PAC decisions to establish fully trained PAC members and an effective PAC Secretariat.
The World Bank regretted that the PAC had yet to review audit reports for fiscal years 1989-90 to 2001-02. The federal ad hoc PAC was able to dispose of audit reports for fiscal year 1996-97 and 1999-2000.
Approximately, 26,000 paragraphs are still required to be examined by the PAC and it is very difficult for the committee to examine outstanding audit reports without a systematic and organized framework and strategy.
The PAC, the World Bank believed, needed to develop a culture of monitoring remedial activities related to their findings, decisions and recommendations by using the latest technology.
