ISLAMABAD: The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on Friday expressed concern over the failure of the National Highway and Motorway Police (NHMP) to deploy policemen at Lahore-Sialkot Motorway (M-11) where a woman was gang-raped in September last year.

A meeting of the PAC, presided over by its chairman Rana Tanveer Hussain, directed the NHMP to take charge of M-11 forthwith.

NHMP Inspector General Kaleem Imam told the committee that due to paucity of resources, they could not deploy staff at the motorway. However, he said, the NHMP had recently made a soft launching by modestly deploying personnel at M-11.

The committee members criticised the National Highway Authority (NHA) over its negligence in maintaining and repairing the motorways.

The PAC sought a progress report from the NHA over the progress on maintaining the Karakoram Highway.

The newly appointed Auditor General Ajmal Gondal briefed the committee about the performance of different sections of his department. He explained the importance of audit reports and how audit reports were prepared with professional competency and due diligence.

He urged the PAC members to give weight to the audit reports to ensure financial transparency in the public sector organisations.

He said that the policies and regulatory oversight could be further strengthened and enhanced with the cooperation of the PAC and its sub-committees. This would help in implementation of directives of the PAC and removing the hurdles and bottlenecks that existed within the system, he said.

The auditor general told the PAC that his department had initiated the process of adopting the audit information management system (AIMS) which would improve the efficiency and output of the PAC and the Auditor General of Pakistan office.

Mr Gondal expressed the hope that the AIMS system would further help reduce and minimise the backlog of audit paras and decisions on audit reports by the PAC and its sub-committees.

Published in Dawn, September 25th, 2021