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Leonard Ncube Victoria Falls Reporter
THE government’s failure to pay subscriptions for public service internal auditors is crippling the workers’ efficiency and professional standing as they fail to attend refresher training courses, an official said.
Institute of Internal Auditors of Zimbabwe chief executive officer Roy Bvekerwa said on the sidelines of a two-day workshop which ended in Victoria Falls on Friday that auditors from the public sector had failed to attend refresher courses for years because their employer cannot pay $75 subscriptions per professional per year.
“We’ve a challenge whereby internal auditors from the public sector find it difficult to become members of the institute to benefit from training because government has not been paying for their membership,” he said.

Bvekerwa said gazetted subscriptions were $75 per auditor per year while those from the private sector pay $150 per year per member. He said as a result internal auditors from government-run institutions and the public sector were not benefiting from any training programme run by the institute saying this compromises their expertise.  Bvekerwa, however, said the African Development Bank has come up with a package to finance training of auditors.

“ADB has come in with a package to train at least 100 central government internal auditors,” he said, adding that as an institute they were engaging different partners for dialogue over the issue to enhance expertise in the profession.

Bvekerwa said some auditors were operating in unfriendly environments which do not allow them to openly participate in programmes related to their skills. About 200 internal auditors attended the conference which drew private and public internal auditors to exchange notes.