The nine-member Public Accounts Committee (PAC) is scheduled to meet on Monday at the Public Buildings to elect its Chairman, APNU Member of Parliament, Ganesh Mahipaul disclosed today.

The PAC is made up of Government Members of Parliament, Minister of Parliamentary Affairs and Governance, Gail Teixeira; Minister of Public Works, Juan Edghill; the Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly, Dr Vishwa Mahadeo; and Members of Parliament Suresh Singh and Sanjeev Datadin – and four Opposition Members of Parliament.

The Opposition MPs are WIN Members of Parliament Vishnu Panday and Nandranie Singh; and APNU Members of Parliament, Juretha Fernandes and Ganesh Mahipaul.

The Chair of the Committee comes from the main opposition in the House.

MP Mahipaul told reporters today that there is much work to be done by the Committee, explaining that it still has to wrap up its work on the Auditor General’s Report on the Public Accounts of Guyana for 2019 before moving on to 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024.

With five full reports to be considered by the PAC, MP Mahipaul said it would be useful to merge at least three of those reports to fast track the process.

“I am hoping and I am sure Juretha and the others who are supportive of us reaching to the current Report of the Auditor General that we can be able to merge at least 2021, 2022 and 2023 reports together and tackle them, so that we can utilize time, so we can reach to current affairs – that would be advantageous for the Public Accounts Committee and the country in terms of guiding the accounting officers,” MP Mahipaul explained.

Justifying his proposal to fast track the work of the PAC, MP Mahipaul said because the Committee is lagging behind by more than five years, it becomes extremely difficult at times to hold accounting officers accountable for issues such as over payments, and mismanagement of projects, programmes and the State’s resources.

“When you have this slow movement of the Public Accounts Committee, which is responsible for examining the Auditor General Report and years past – look, we have 2024 report now, and we are in the year 2026. In the year 2026 hopefully we are going to begin examining 2020, that is six years after, and there are certain problems we will not be able to hold accounting officers responsible for because of the statute of limitation. In law, and I am no lawyer but it was well established that certain matters become statute barred or the statute of limitation kicks in because by 2020 the accounting officers were different, they may claim they can’t remember what happened six years ago. You can’t fault somebody if they say six years ago they can’t remember this or they can’t remember that, it was six years ago, people have advanced in age, accounting officers have changed, people have moved onto different work environment,” MP Mahipaul reasoned.

 Weighing on the issue, MP Fernandes said there is no danger in merging the reports.

According to her, should the Committee use this approach, special attention would be placed on sections of the reports that flagged major issues.

 “When we talk about merging the reports together, we do it in a sense that nothing can be missed. For example if we merge 2020, 2021 and 2022 reports, three reports we are merging together, what we will do is that we will have the agencies, the financial officers come before the PAC as they would do for any other single report but when they come, they will be answering questions for the three reports, instead of just coming to answer for one. What it does, it makes it a hold lot more efficient because what you would find in the Auditor General’s report a lot of times you would have follow-ups and previous year matters repeating itself,” MP Fernandes explained.

The last PAC was chaired by then APNU+AFC Member of Parliament, Jermaine Figueira, who ahead of the 2025 Elections switched sides and joined forces with the ruling People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C).

Under his leadership, the PAC was hamstrung by an amendment to the Standing Orders of the National Assembly, which changed the quorum requirement for the Committee to meet, and resulting in numerous cancellations due to the lack of a quorum.

The then Opposition had bemoaned the fact that after five years, the PAC was unable to scrutinize the current Government’s spending.

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