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Leonard Ncube, Victoria Falls Reporter

PARLIAMENTARIANS have called for an urgent amendment of the audit and public finance management Acts to come up with a comprehensive piece of legislation that would censure entities that fail to account for money allocated to them through Treasury.

Concerns have also been raised over delays in setting up the audit board whose existence would facilitate the monitoring process.

The recommendation by Parliamentarians emerged during the just ended 2020 pre-budget seminar here.

It comes at a time reports from the Auditor General have revealed that some local authorities were yet to account for the five percent devolution funds allocated to them by Government last year.
Government allocated more than $700 million towards devolution process with local authorities getting a combined $310 million to facilitate infrastructural development in their areas.

Regrettably, said Deputy Auditor General Mrs Nyasha Magadza at the seminar, some councils have failed to account.

“Some local authorities are not accounting for the money allocated to them.

“Mr Speaker sir, we desperately need an audit board so that all this can be dealt with and the Audit Act and Public Finance Management Act need to be urgently aligned to the Constitution,” said Mrs Magadza.

Speaker of Parliament, Advocate Mudenda, with Members of Parliament in agreement, said urgent action was needed to protect tax payers’ money.

“As we devolve power, how do we ask the Minister of Finance (Prof Mthuli Ncube) to devolve the five percent to local authorities who are failing to account for what they are getting? We need to revisit the Audit Act, particularly, Sections 11 and 12.

“In fact, we need to clean up those sections to include an element of censure and one of the solutions could be to suspend those sections otherwise we might continue putting money to local authorities that don’t account,” said Adv Mudenda.

Prof Ncube said Treasury will allocate more funds for devolution hence the need for deployment of skills for administration of the funds. He said an audit board will be in place in the first quarter next year.

“As for the devolution funds allocated to provinces and local authorities for infrastructure, health and other economic development, we allocated $703 million in 2019 but not all of it was spent.

We will allocate more in 2020 despite this and we will continue to improve on the formula,” said Prof Ncube.
He said Treasury and the Auditor General’s office were in discussion about the appointment of the audit board.

“We have taken note of legal frameworks around transfer of these funds so we stay on the right side of the law. For now there are robust discussions between Treasury and the Auditor General’s office as we want to support the office to invest in technology while the board will be in place in the next few months as we set March 2020 as our target,” Prof Ncube said.

The devolution funds are allocated to all provinces to be able to plan and implement their economic growth and development using their factor endowments, with central Government contributing through the five percent allocation annually in terms of the Transitional Stabilisation Programme. — @ncubeleon