The Audit Office of Guyana will be undertaking a special audit into Old Age Pension books, as well as the Public Assistance booklets, according to Auditor General Deodat Sharma.

Last week, the Ministry of Human Services announced the launch of a Police Force investigation into the presence of unauthorized copies of Old Age Pension and Permanent Disability books, after several were submitted for encashment.

The Ministry in a statement said the unauthorized books do not bear the security features and colours of the official books.

During the handing over of the 2023 Auditor General’s Report on Moday, the Auditor General said his office will be investigating the issue.

“The Audit Act gives the Auditor General the mandate to carry out special audits and we are presently conducting special audits into the supply of crusher run stones and also one on the old age pension and public assistance booklets,” Sharma said.

In addition, the Auditor General noted that his office is currently undertaking some new forms of audit, such as performance audits to ensure greater accountability in the public sector.

“The Audit office of Guyana has been diligently working to ensure that entities and their relevant personal grasp the significance of performance audit, this is a new type of audit we are doing in addition to the financial audit on the public accounts. This commitment was evident when 142 officers from the public sector participated in a workshop on the issue in March,” the Auditor General said.

With the growth of the National Budget and the increase in infrastructural development, the office has boosted its engineering capacity in order to increase oversight.

“With the growth of the budget, we have our engineering department and for this period the audit office has employed three additional engineers to work in the Works and structure department increasing the total numbers of engineers from 3 to 5 at present. As a result, the division was able to increase the total number of projects inspected for the year under review from 466 for the 2023 to 741 in 2023,’ Sharma noted.

There have been calls by the Opposition for the audit of several major government projects that have attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts.

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