Communications Minister Maxie Cuffie says audit findings by the Auditor General tend to be used as a weapon in the arsenal of politicians and like most weapons if it is not used properly it ends up doing more harm than good.
In the keynote address at an Institute of Internal Auditors Breakfast Forum at the Trinidad Hilton and Conference Centre, Cuffie said:"If I am to believe what I am seeing in the news recently, even Journalists are being accused of misreading and scandalising audit reports."
The minister wondered whether the governance of state entities where the details of bad spending were made public, had improved.
"Has the governance of the National Gas Company, for example, been made any better,after the revelations of audit findings? Can the operations of the Agricultural Development Bank now withstand public scrutiny after the revelations of more than a year ago?
"A more pertinent question might be whether the end users of the core businesses of either the NGC or the ADB are better served today as a result of the audit findings revealed
earlier?"
Cuffie said the time has come to put systems in place to prevent the findings of audit reports from being used as a political weapon. He also expressed concern that although there are monitoring and evaluation departments in all ministries they have not been effective.This means that institutions must not only be set up but be properly staffed with people who have the highest integrity, he said.
He called for auditing methods to be changed from the traditional audit report-based activities to performance audits "which concentrate on value for money rather than on auditing documents and books of accounts only."
Cuffie said auditors are best placed to speak truth to power and would have guided successive adminstrations on whether a particular programme is successful or not.
"It seems, therefore, that in this paradigm good and independent auditors must have the courage of their conviction to say it as they see it and be willing to stand up to legislators as well as to top management at the ministries and state agencies under audit," he said.