ISLAMABAD, Nov 15: International donors have asked Islamabad to place reconstruction activities of the armed forces under the Auditor-General of Pakistan (AGP) and formulate a ‘corruption mitigation strategy’ to win trust aimed at speedy transfer of foreign donations.

“We have asked the president and the prime minister to minimize fiduciary risks to gain maximum international trust for converting commitments of $2.5 billion aid into a reality and get maximum funding pledges at the donors’ conference on November 19,” the country representative of a multilateral agency told Dawn.

The donors have emphasized that audit of reconstruction activities of the military should be done by AGP as the regular budget audit instead of the military audit.

The official said that donors would jointly keep a close watch on four fiduciary risks and then come out with a six-monthly monitoring report. These risks, he pointed out, are related to huge procurement portion, the process of accounting and reporting, audit, and parliamentary accountability.

He said that two areas, procurement and parliamentary accountability, were ‘weak’. The Public Procurement Regulatory Authority is particularly very weak while the Public Accounts Committee has a big time lag. The trust gap, he said, could be improved by extending the jurisdiction of AGP to all agencies involved in recovery operations, particularly the military operations.

He said the donors had demanded that military should not charge its recovery operation costs, but the government took the position that it was kind of normal contracts and therefore would need to be paid from funds of the Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority (Erra).

He said that Pakistan army had its own accounting and audit system of the defence budget which was a one-line transfer from the federal budget to military budget.