The Ad Hoc Public Accounts Committee (PAC) headed by Mr H.U. Beg has taken 11 months to examine the financial irregularities and misuse of official funds and facilities by ministers and official during the 12 months of 1999-2000, and yet it claims to have done its work in a “record time.”

That could only mean that its elected predecessors in the National Assembly took far longer time to examine the accounts placed before them with all their excesses and ghastly lapses and completed the work very late.

In the case of the committee it should have normally taken less time than it has as it relates to the first year of the current military rule when we are supposed to have far less corruption or official lapses than during the political rule. If instead it was examining the accounts of political years after they had been duly audited it might have taken far longer time.

Such laxity on the part of the PAC had made Mohammad Khan Junejo as prime minister scoff at its report submitted to him very late, and asked what use was the report after some of the culprits mentioned in it had died and many others had vanished and the large amounts mentioned as recoverable were in reality unrecoverable?

And yet when the PPP came to power it was pretty lax in this area, and during its first term it had Hakim Ali Zardari as chairman of the PAC, set up very late.

The hearings of the PAC were for the first time totally public with full access to the press and the electronic media. And that upset the officials who were asked to appear before it, they tried hard to make the hearings in closed sessions and keep the press and electronic media out. But despite numerous attempts by the angry officials, Mr Beg, former finance secretary, did not agree to keep the hearings a closed exercise.

In his report to President Musharraf he has now strongly recommended that future hearings of the PAC that will be set up by the elected National Assembly should be open to the press and the electronic media. and that is regarded essential for transparency in public administration and prevent excessive irregularities by officials.

We had in the days of political rule, for example, a Speaker of the National Assembly, Yusuf Raza Gilani, who had ten cars at the expense of the government and three offices, including one in Lahore and another in Multan, besides the regular Islamabad Speaker’s office.

Real transparency in public administration and full accountability are essential in a country which until recently was categorised as the second to fifth “most corrupt country in the world” in successive years by Transparency International (TI) of Berlin. If Pakistan’s status has by now become less ghastly in the table of corrupt nations published by TI, it is because a number of corrupt African, Latin-American and Central Asian states are crowding the list at the top. Secondly, fewer foreign investors have been coming to Pakistan in recent years to report back their perception of corruption in Pakistan.

Anyway, the country has by now been accustomed to open hearings of the PAC and it will be too difficult to put the clock back and make the hearings closed as the officials or the politicians may want it. And that is a very good thing. Anyway, Pakistan is too poor a country with almost 40 per cent of the people living below the poverty line, to permit plundering by the top men and heavy financial bungling by the officials below them who run into millions.

The PAC says that it is not enough to expose financial irregularities. Along with that, determined efforts should be made to recover the misused or bungled funds.

The PAC in its report to the President says it had come across misuse of funds of Rs7.64 billion in 1999-2000. And out of that after the report was completed Rs2.53 billion had been refunded. And that leaves Rs5.3 billion to recover, which is a pretty large sum.

The PAC has also suggested that the temporary implementation committee set up by it in the National Assembly secretariat should be made permanent and strengthened to follow up disclosure of irregularities with actual recovery of the money. That, of course,is very essential to make the work of the PAC effective and assert parliamentary control over public spending and real vigilance in respect of actual expenditure.

Activation of the Departmental Accounts Committee, (DAC), says the report, has given good results. And it wants this mechanism to be allowed to play its full role in sifting the irregularities listed in the records and acting on them.

Mr Beg is also reported to have said that corruption had come to an end in the government. How could he say such a thing if he actually did? Until recently it was said that corrupt has vanished from the top of the government or higher levels. The same was claimed in the days of the fallen Nawaz Sharif government as well, but by now we know the truth is far different as the National Accountability Bureau’s recovery drive testifies.

The Sindh Ombudsman, Justice Raziq-ul Khairi, recently said that Sindh was an ocean of corruption. And he was right. Accounting and auditing in the Sindh government have been very poor and a public accounts committee is a rare thing, more symbolic than substantial.

When the taxation reforms committee was set up last year under Shahid Husain,a former vice-president of the World Bank, he said 40 to 50 per cent of the payments made by tax payers were going into the pockets of taxation officials. And that is as large as about Rs200 billion. And now the Auditor General of Pakistan protests against the practice of the federal and provincial governments holding billions of rupee in personal ledger accounts in the form of non-lapsable funds. The Auditor General (AG) holds this a serious irregularity and is bringing that to the notice of competent authorities.

President Musharraf on a recent visit to the office of the AG stressed the need for efficient and prompt accounting and auditing of public funds. evidently the present practices which are a hang-over from the distant past cannot continue indefinitely without doing serious injury to public finance.

On one side a good deal of public funds is lost at the stage of tax collection. And if out of the net funds collected a large part goes into the pockets of officials and politicians, including on useless or uncompleted projects the country is bound to suffer greatly.

A workshop of audit officials, attended by the former AG, Riaz Husain Bokhari, was told this week that the Revenue Audit had recovered Rs3.29 billion from the accounts of 2001-2 and the expenditure on that was as little as Rs40.8 million. Mr Bokhari said diligent and systematic auditing and accounting could save a great deal of funds for the government.

Evidently accounting and auditing have to be given a great deal more importance so that all the money collected by the revenue officials goes into the coffers of the government, and then the money is judiciously and properly spent, and misused or misspent money promptly identified and recovered.

That means the PAC to come should be properly manned, and not be headed by a member of the ruling party, it should do its work efficiently and systematically and ensure absolute transparency in its work to be truly credible.