Biman queries spending

Absence of breakdown of Parliament expenditure highlighted

PARLIAMENT spent $7.6 million in 2015 without providing an account for how the money was used, says National Federation Party (NFP) leader Professor Biman Prasad.

He made the comment in the House on Tuesday during debate on the review of the Legislature Department’s annual reports 2014-2015.

“Normally, you will see a breakdown of how the money is spent, for example, in wages, travel, maintenance, operations, et cetera but not in 2015,” Prof Prasad said.

“All the expenditure is shown on one line, operating grants and transfers, there is no explanation for this.”

The NFP leader quoted the Office of the Auditor-General’s comments on the anomaly – “The Office (Parliament) did not provide any grant to other agencies and the grant was used for the operating expenses of Parliament. The operating expenses incurred were not recorded into respective SEGs 1 to 13 and hence provides misleading information to the users of the special purpose statements.”

Prof Prasad said it was a concern that Parliament itself had been criticised by the AuditorGeneral for misleading financial statements.

“Parliament itself will not tell the people how it spent $7.6 million of taxpayers money so the question naturally is, what is going on here? How do we explain that?

“On one hand, we have political parties, you know we are required to break down and report the raising and use of every single cent that political parties collect, on the other hand the people’s Parliament, who belong to the political parties are not told how money is allocated for each activity and segment of Parliament’s financial requirements.”

Opposition parliamentarian Mosese Bulitavu said the issues raised by Prof Prasad had been addressed by Department of Legislature manager finance Miriama Vereivalu.

He quoted the comments made by Ms Vereivalu that when the Legislature Department prepared its annual financial statement for 2015, “it was reflected under one allocation, SEG 6.

“The money was given through SEG 6 so all the payment through the financial management information system (FMIS) was reflected only in one allocation,” Ms Vereivalu had said.

“So the figures that are reflected in the 2016 annual financial statement is extracted straight from the FMIS under SEG 6 but then we revised because we maintained the manual ledger so what we did, we were maintaining a manual expenditure statement on a monthly basis so when we revised the figures, we had to distribute it from SEGs 1-13.”