AS many as 15 Members of Parliament, including government ministers, are under “active” police investigations for alleged misuse of funds, highly-placed sources said yesterday.
Cases of three MPs, including a Government Minister, have reached an advanced stage of investigation and charges could be laid within a matter of weeks, the sources said.
Sources said the investigations related to the use of the $10 million cattle project as well as the $15 million grants provided to the victims of the 2007 tsunami, which hit Choiseul and Western provinces.
The revelation comes as the Auditor General released a damning report which has identified “major internal control weaknesses … being prevalent across the public sector”.
Dated 7th December 2009, the report, “Status of Audits of Solomon Islands Government Entities as at 30 June 2009” was circulated to Members of Parliament only.
Solomon Star has obtained a copy of the report.
In the controversial cattle project funded by Taiwan, the report said staff of the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock were “pressured by a Member of Parliament to allocate and pay funds to cattle farmers in his Constituency ...”
Because of this, four cattle farmers on Malaita missed out on the funding in phase one of the project, the report said.
The Auditor General then highlighted the weaknesses identified by the audits.
“ … in this Report, I focus on the three major internal control weaknesses that audits have identified as being prevalent across the public sector.
“These are:
- A failure to comply with required internal control and accountability procedures;
- Inappropriate use of funds; and
- Financial reporting which may be inadequate, inaccurate, untimely and misleading.
“These internal control deficiencies allow waste, inefficiency, corruption, fraud and theft in a failure to provide essential government services,” Auditor General, Edward Ronia, wrote in the Foreword of the damning report.
The Auditor General’s Office performed 33 audits in the year to 30 June 2009.
Mr Ronia said these weaknesses would be corrected if public officers and officials complied with “the documented procedures and rules that exist and did not process transactions that did not comply with these rules and procedures”.
“Disciplinary procedures exist in the General Orders and these procedures should be used to motivate public officials from waste and corruption by complying with the rules, particularly the Financial Instructions,” he said.
The Auditor General warned that “failure to solve the internal control problems highlighted in my audit reports … will result in continuing and escalating public disillusionment with the government.”
“The consequences of widespread public disillusionment in the Solomon Islands have been seen before,” he said.
Officials who “consistently fail to comply with Financial Instructions” will face disciplinary action this year.
“This will mean that officers who do not regularly reconcile bank accounts they are responsible for, who fail to acquit imprest accounts they hold or who regularly process or authorize transactions without adequate documentation can expect to be named in reports that go to the relevant Permanent Secretary with a recommendation that disciplinary action be commenced against them,” he said.
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