Who is minding the till?

On Tuesday, December 3, the Auditor-General published a thorough, 149-page report, after concluding a performance audit on the school information system of the Education Department.

The aim of the exercise, carried out last year, was to determine whether the policy of introducing IT systems in local school management was successfully realised and whether funds invested in the project were spent wisely.

It will be recalled that government policy to introduce IT in school management was launched in the mid-Nineties, when the much-touted Management Systems Unit, working under the wing of the Prime Minister's Office, purported to play the role of Wizard of Oz by catapulting single-handedly the civil service into the approaching millennium.

In this particular instance, the MSU entered into a contractual agreement with a UK firm, which was awarded a tender, valued at £826,155, in 1996 to supply a school information system. The system was to be operational by 1998.

Separate agreements, worth over Lm1.3 million, were entered into for the provision to the Education Division of software, hardware, project management, training and related maintenance and support services.

It has transpired from the Performance Audit that the Education Division was not involved at the planning and contract stages. It also transpired that the UK supplier failed to deliver a number of deliverables. Nevertheless, overpayments, estimated at £170,000, were made to the supplier.

It emerged from the same performance audit that there were delays in implementing the project. At one stage, it was agreed to extend the contractual agreement to 2005.

But due to incompetence and the deplorable lack of co-ordination with the Education Division, the project stalled until the exasperated Education authorities abandoned the project. The contract was terminated last year.

The Education Department set out to acquire a Rolls Royce. In the end it had to make do with a Mini-Minor.

Ten days after the clamorous disclosures by the audit-general, there has not been a single comment by the local media. Much less has the taxpaying public been given an inkling of any measures to hold to account the officials responsible for this debacle.

Notoriously all bureaucrats are expert at hiding their shortcomings and misdemeanors. In functioning democracies there is a remedy. Taxpaying citizens exercise their right to know - and in Malta the Auditor General, who is an Officer of Parliament, has adequate power to probe and inform.

What is positively lacking is the follow-up. The government of the day is expected to react quickly to the Auditor General's observations and admonitions. It doesn't. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of Parliament to intervene when shortcomings, incompetence or abuse come to light. It couldn't be said that Parliament is either alert or overly inquisitive in this regard.

Unless Parliament is vigilant and solicitously exigent, with a no-nonsense approach towards maladministration and incompetence, the Auditor-General is treading water.

It has to be said that, since the office of Auditor-General was given its head and became directly accountable to Parliament, it has progressed by leaps and bounds. The quality of its workforce has improved. Its independent initiatives have exposed the administration to the glare of public scrutiny to a degree which is commendable.

It is one thing for the policeman to catch the thief, and another to take him to court. The job of prosecution belongs to the administration and ultimately to Parliament.

This is Malta's soft under-belly. It is where the public service is found wanting.

Year after year, the Auditor-General has reported to Parliament that arrears of revenue due to Government are piling up and have reached unacceptable levels. In spite of monitoring by the Ministry of Finance (if any) to control revenue arrears, there is no evidence of significant improvements. The contrary is the case.

Suffice it to say that the approximate amount of outstanding arrears due to Government at the end of 1999 stood at an incredible Lm393 million. The last published annual report of the Auditor-General (for the year 2000) disclosed that only Lm75 million, or 19 per cent of that amount, was collected during 2000. On the other hand, Lm169 million were newly accrued arrears for the same year - and this at a time when the Ministry of Finance was boasting about improved efficiency in revenue collection!

The Auditor-General declared that it is unacceptable that a situation is allowed to develop wherein a revenue-earning department is not in a position to quantify arrears of revenue due to it. It is unacceptable that revenue arrears are allowed to be statute-barred through delays.

It is even more unacceptable that government departments and parastatal bodies fall behind in their tax payments to the point that they collectively owed the Exchequer a total of Lm79 million in arrears at the end of 2000.

Another sore point raised, year in year out, by the Auditor-General, highlighted an extraordinary mystery: namely the disquieting fact that the government's public account was not formally reconciled with the Central Bank account since June 1992 which happens to be the year when the present Minister of Finance took over the Ministry.

The Auditor-General's annual report for 2000 stated that "monies held in trust, received or paid by the government as at December 31, 2000, amounted to Lm17,881,384 as accounted for in Treasury Books. However, the Central Bank ended with a closing balance of Lm16,128,956 as on the same date.

"The discrepancy of Lm1,752,428 cannot to date be explained due to the fact that Treasury has not carried out monthly reconciliation exercise of the Public Account since June 1992. The necessity to update the reconciliation exercises of the Public Account has repeatedly been reported upon since 1993."

Never mind what has had to be done since the publication of the last annual report, the above extract highlights the futility of having an efficient watchdog when its barking is systematically ignored.

It is bad enough when the bureaucracy fails miserably to rise to the occasion. It is much worse when there is a lack of political will to get to grips with a malady that reduces Malta to Third World country status!

If the government cannot keep a watchful eye on the nation's till, and Parliament doesn't crack the whip, a vociferous electorate, egged on by the media, ought to be the last resort.

What keeps the independent media from rising in chorus to the occasion?