Govt ready for 3rd party audit: Use of quake funds
By Ihtasham ul Haque
ISLAMABAD, Nov 16: The government said on Wednesday that it was ready to introduce a “third-party auditing and validation system” to satisfy international donors’ concerns about transparency in the use of funds for reconstruction activities in the earthquake-hit region.
Informed sources told Dawn that in his meeting with Islamabad-based foreign diplomats and representatives of international financial institutions (IFIs) on Monday, President Gen Pervez Musharraf offered every possible guarantee for fair distribution of aid and corruption-free reconstruction.
The sources said the Japanese ambassador and a few European Union envoys specifically raised the issue of transparency and sought assurances from the president.
President Musharraf told them that although the country’s auditor general was already there to oversee spending, the government would not be averse to third party audit and validation and invited the international donor community to nominate an agency of their choice, sources said.
“Now when international donors seem interested in helping us, they do want accountability and corruption-free relief and reconstruction activities,” a source said.
He said diplomats sounded sympathetic to Pakistan’s needs but were fearful of misuse of their countries’ assistance in the absence of some “strong audit and validation system”.
The foreign envoys also wanted to know how the government proposed to fill the “financing gap” in case it did not get in full the $3.5 billion foreign assistance it needed for rebuilding the infrastructure destroyed by the Oct 8 earthquake in the NWFP and Azad Kashmir.
In the first place, the president said, the government would be reluctant to cut its development budget because it wanted to protect social sectors that had been neglected in the past. But he said the government would then perhaps not have any option but to cut its administration’s expenditure.
The sources said that foreign envoys supported the president that there should be no cut on the Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP) which had been increased from roughly Rs120 billion of 1998-99 to Rs272 billion in 2005-06.
The participants also want representation of civilian officials to be enhanced along with military personnel to effectively carry out relief and reconstruction activities.
“But there is donor fatigue following disasters in North America, the Asian tsunami and now in Pakistan,” another source said. He said that multilateral agencies had assured they would provide more soft loans and were expecting Pakistan’s bilateral creditors to extend substantial funding in the shape of pure grants on no return basis.
