The Times of Malta has, over the past weeks, been featuring excerpts from reports of the National Audit Office on local government and the ministries, with one after the other being named and shamed. They are straight and to the point, with clear and precise indications of where departments are defaulting and, therefore, how they should right wrongs.
The Auditor General conducts such investigations as a routine, year after year, irrespective of the party in power. They are invaluable to each one of us – if only we care to go through them – because they force us to take off our partisan glasses and look through the rhetoric and small talk that politicians and some civil servants come up with to defend what, in reality, would bethe indefensible.
Giving the NAO’s findings the weight they usually deserve should also make us blame ourselves for allowing such shortcomings to continue repeating themselves, as they invariably do.
The NAO waves red flags and, like any auditor, its yardstick is zero tolerance. This is why, for example, it exposed the Ta’ Xbiex council for spending €20 without getting a fiscal receipt, just as it did the Mtarfa council for its €53,233 expense.
The question is what happens then.
Shortly after his appointment in 2008, the present Auditor General, Anthony Mifsud said: “This is not the kind of job that brings you friends in its wake. We audit material errors and shortcomings in government financial and other operations. We also look into lack of good practice which is generally not due to fraud but to lack of adherence to financial rules and regulations, weaknesses in internal controls and mismanagement.”
He was being kind. Some of the amounts involved and the collusion that would have been required to enable those involved to get away with it are, atbest, suspicious. Sometimes, they maystink too.
Still, how many heads have rolled, especially when the matter is considered serious enough to be referred to the Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee?
The problem is that we as voters have become blasé about what to expect from those who are meant to serve us. We conveniently forget the appalling greed, lust for power and petty thievery that lead to the shoddy workmanship and overspending we would never allow whether at our homes and businesses.
And, yet, this is still our money that is being frittered away. This is still our country that has to settle for inferior roads, that has to pay subsidies to make up for irresponsibly-channelled funds.
When releasing the Nationalist Party’s proposals for good governance, leader Simon Busuttil said that “we must learn from our mistakes” and then drew on examples about the present government’s failings. But, make no mistake, the shortcomings raised by the NAO year after year do not depend on the party in government.
Dr Busuttil said that the PN’s shortcoming was “having failed to ensure that good governance was sufficiently entrenched in the country as to outlive its own government”. So should say all of us. But we would add “any government”.
Of course, the PN makes some very good recommendations in this regard, calling for reviews of everything from the way public procurement is handled to a review of the set-up of the NAO itself.
Still, nothing will change, especially if we, the electorate, are willing to pardon the sins, even grave ones, committed by ‘our’ party when in government. Both have a lot to answer for and it is up to us to demand answers and remedial action.