It is quite a revelation to go through the Annual Report of the Auditor General for the year April 2008 to March 2009. As you read this report, the first thing that hits you is that Belize is operating a Government service\bureaucracy for the 1950s in the 21^st century.

The thousands of citizens that do business with the government know that the Government of Belize (GOB) has a computerized system called the SMARTSTREAM Accounting System, which the government invested millions of dollars in creating and implementing.

More than twelve years later, the Audit Department is showing that the two parallel accounting systems are not balancing. For example, in the case of revenues, the Accountant General’s figure is $5,955,214.68 more than the figure that was recorded in the SMARTSTREAM system.  This is what the Audit department calls a “material error” or in layman’s terms, a large bookkeeping error.

The Auditor General also sounded the alarm that there are several accounts that are not “balancing” and no reconciliation has been done. There are sixteen bank accounts totaling $72,167,204.00 for which no bank reconciliations or confirmations were made.

When an audit was made at the sub treasuries they found an imbalance. The sub treasuries held $517,439.44 and the SMARTSTREAM reported $270,970.16. This is a difference of $246,469.28.

A check at the Official Charities Fund Card showed a balance of $1,274,511.68 while the statement submitted for auditing showed a balance $507,109.25

During this audit, the Pension Scheme was also reviewed and again discrepancies were discovered. To ensure that the pensions paid are made to pensioners that are still alive, a Pensions Clerk must make a weekly visit to the Vital Statistics Department to review the list of the Death Register. A review of the visitors register their revealed that there are no regular reviews of the Death Register and actually the last visit by a Pensions Clerk was on 16 May 2007!

This break down in the system is expensive, and it resulted in delays in the termination of payments to deceased and non-qualifying pensioners, among other things.  The audit review revealed that checks were issued to 27 persons who were already dead! This breakdown in the system cost Belizean taxpayers more than a quarter of a million dollars.

The audit continued to make more startling revelations. For instance, 75 percent of the names on the Pensions List have no address. No verification was done by the Treasury Department to check on the authenticity of the information on the Life Certificate provided by pensioners.

The list of revelations include: unaccounted gas for missing vehicles, wasteful contracts, unfinished contracts, uncollected loans and other irregularities by municipal bodies and Government employees.

Any manager with a budget of over $800,000,000.00 will tell you that they would never manage their funds the way our government does.

In this regard the Auditor General’s report make a number of significant recommendations. First, he calls on the Public Accounts Committee to be more active and to call government accounting officers to task in addressing the issues raised by his report.

In this regard, credit must be given to the present Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee Hon. Mark Espat who has made numerous attempts to get this committee operational but has failed because UDP ministers refuse to cooperate.

Secondly, he is recommending that his office conduct Value for Money Audits. Thirdly, that the National Assembly votes on their budget and fourthly that an Internal Audit Unit is created in every ministry.

Belizean taxpayers may think that this would increase the bureaucracy and GOB’s wage bill but looking at the Auditor’s report, we can see the wisdom in these recommendations.

The Prime Minister took over the portfolio of Governance in CARICOM. I hope he would show the example to his Heads of State colleagues by taking the Auditor General’s recommendations seriously.