Brent Symonette, chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, has complained that government, which promised Bahamians in 2002 that if elected its administration would be one of transparency, is anything but transparent – especially when it comes to accounting for how the people’s money is being spent.
He said that government’s decision to hide behind a legal opinion that only documents tabled in the House of Assembly are to be submitted to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) was hampering the work of the committee.
From the day in 1913 that this committee was created it was “mandatory that the committee report at least twice every session and at least 60 days before the end of the session.”
Mr Symonette said the PAC had asked government to disclose the spending for the fiscal years ending in 2004 and 2005. However, he said, it has met with constant roadblocks because the Auditor General’s report for those years is not yet on the table of the House. It was only last month that Government tabled the Auditor General’s report for the 2002-2003 fiscal year.
This is no way to run a business – in fact it is an impossible way to run a business. But this is the way that the finances of government – the biggest business of all – is mismanaged.
This problem never arose until the PLP came on the scene in 1967. Until then no one knew that such a rule existed, because until the advent of the PLP, government was managed by efficient businessmen. Bahamians can say what they like about the UBP, but they managed government like a business. The Auditor General’s report was up to date as required by law, and the Public Accounts Committee: having received the public accounts on time, was able to meet its statutory obligation to report to the House at least twice every session.
In all the years that we reported the House – pre-PLP — the Public Accounts Committee was recognised as parliament’s most powerful standing committee. And the committee’s ability to send for persons and papers was not an issue, because the documents were presented, and the persons involved must have cooperated because we never heard that they did not.
However, it was in the eighties that government’s blocking of the PAC’s right to documents became a real issue.
And of all persons to bring it to the fore was then Attorney General Paul Adderley. Mr Adderley must have known what the problem was when the PAC ceased to function because it was he who had blocked information requested by the PAC, under the chairmanship of Norman Solomon. Mr Solomon was trying to account to Bahamians on how their money was being used by the Pindling government to subsidise a failing Bahamasair.
According to Mr Adderley “Bahamasair Holdings Limited was not a department or office of the government and therefore it is not the function of the Auditor General to audit the accounts of that company.” And so, “as night follows day,” if the auditor general could not audit the accounts, there were no accounts for the PAC to check. Apparently, it was nobody’s business that in the first three months of 1975, $2.6 million of the people’s money went from the Public Treasury to underwrite Bahamasair.
Probably the last time the PAC was heard from was on July 2,1975 when Mr Solomon complained of the difficulty his committee was having investigating legitimate matters of concern.
In view of this we don’t know if Mr Adderley’s memory failed him, or if he was just trying to play cute and score political brownie points when on November 24, 1987 he reminded the House that the PAC had not met once between 1982 and 1987.
“It is the most important committee of the House and the only one that is in the hands of the Opposition,” Mr Adderley intoned sanctimoniously, as he proceeded to lecture the Opposition on its duties. His tongue really must have been in his cheek during that harangue.
The only way that public expenditure can be properly watched by parliament is by the Opposition, said Mr Adderley. He wanted the “committee system to work.”
Once the Treasury closes its books for a financial year; “there is no means and no method by which you can hide from them (the PAC) public expenditure.”
Obviously, he had forgotten how he had blocked the committee trying to investigate the people’s money which had gone from the Public Treasury to support the national airline.
If Mr Adderley was not laughing at the political hypocrisy, many Bahamians were. Having prodded among the Opposition’s dying embers, ostensibly to rekindle their flame and awaken them to their public duty, Mr Adderley was probably sorry in the end that he didn’t let “sleeping dogs lie.”
The middle eighties saw the battle to restore the PAC to the powerful position that members claimed it had. In fact on the government side members were only giving lip service to the claim. In fact they had reduced the committee to a eunuch.
Despite what Mr Adderley had said every method was used to successfully hide the public accounts from this country’s taxpayers.
Editorial from The Tribune
