Posts Tagged ‘Fiscal Management and Accountability Act’

Supplementary or contingency: same abuse – Part 3

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

Introduction
To begin today’s column I conclude with two of the provisions relating to supplementary appropriations in the Fiscal Management and Accountability Act 2003 (FMAA). The first is that except in circumstances of grave national emergency, there can be no more than five supplementary appropriation bills in any one year. Second, every appropriation of public moneys authorised by Parliament for a fiscal year lapses and ceases to have effect as at the end of that fiscal year. And just in case any official, minister, or the Audit Office needs reminding, section 38 of the FMAA repeats what is stated in section 21, ie, that all public moneys raised or received by the government must be credited fully and promptly to the Consolidated Fund. “Public moneys” is defined to mean all moneys belonging to the state, including tax and non-tax revenue collections authorised by law; grants to the government; budget agency receipts; moneys borrowed by the state or received through the issuance and sale of securities; and moneys received or collected for and on behalf of the state.

The Contingencies Fund
I now turn to the constitutional provision governing the Contingencies Fund. The position is that if Parliament decides to establish a Contingencies Fund, Article 220 permits it to do so by paying into it a specific amount, the quantum of which is determined and, therefore, limited by law in respect of any year. The article goes on to authorise the minister responsible for finance to make advances from that fund, if he is satisfied that there is an urgent need for expenditure for which no other provision exists.

Advances from the Contingencies Fund must be cleared by a supplementary estimate laid before the National Assembly as soon as practicable (see 4) below), thus replacing the amount so advanced. Section 41 of the FMAA gives effect to Article 220 by providing that:

1) The Contingencies Fund is limited to two per cent of the estimated annual expenditure of the previous financial year or such greater sum as the National Assembly may approve. It is fixed for each year, either by way of the formula or an act and the minister cannot increase it without parliamentary authority.

2) Only the Minister of Finance can authorise the release of moneys from the Contingencies Fund and must do so personally. Legally, not even the President can instruct the Minister of Finance when it comes to this fund.

3) By way of a drawing right, the minister may make an advance from the Contingencies Fund. The circumstances under which he can do so are severely limited – the overriding test is threefold: urgent, unavoidable and unforeseen. Further, he can use this fund only where no or inadequate sums had previously been appropriated, or where reallocation under the FMAA is not possible, or finally, where delay would cause injury to the public interest. He cannot use the fund to meet a promise by the President to do something or the other, or because he failed to budget properly, or because some budget agency was careless.

4) The Minister must report at the next sitting of the National Assembly all advances made out of the Contingencies Fund, specifying (a) the amounts advanced; (b) to whom the amounts were paid; and (c) the purpose of the advances.

5) On approving such advance, the National Assembly must pass a supplementary appropriation act covering the advance.

I reject what appears to be the government’s implicit assumption that Article 220 establishing the Contingency Fund somehow overrides the provisions of Articles 216-219 establishing the sanctity and unity of the Consolidated Fund, and providing an elaborate regime for expenditure of public funds. All that Article 220 does is to authorise Parliament to establish, if it wishes, a Contingencies Fund. The FMAA sets the limit on the sum of money to be paid into this fund and sets out the procedures governing the use and operation of the fund. The purpose of Article 220 is to convert the demand for money to be available for unforeseeable expenditure, which could be treated as a demand for loose or floating money, into a demand for a determinable amount of money for a specific purpose approved by law made by Parliament and by the constitution.

The purpose and combined effect of the constitutional provisions and the FMAA is that all expenditure, whether from the Consolidated Fund or its sub-fund the Contingencies Fund, must be by way of an appropriation act. This allows the National Assembly to retain control of public moneys while allowing the executive branch sufficient latitude to conduct governmental business. The limitation on the number of supplementary appropriation bills would seem designed to impose a form of financial discipline and order on the Ministry of Finance and budget agencies, in contrast to haphazard, guesswork financial management.

Against this constitutional and statutory background we can now consider the six Financial Papers presented to the National Assembly for 2009 for a total sum of $15,703 million. As we see from the table below, the amounts provided to clear advances from the Contingency Fund were $3,936 million while supplementary provisions amounted to $11,767 million. These were approved by way of Supplementary Appropriations Acts passed on August 25 and December 14, 2009 and January 14, 2010.

Table of Supplementary Appropriations in respect of 2009

Source: Acts and Financial Papers

1. While nothing new can be said about the failure to deposit the lotto funds into the Consolidated Fund, equally dangerously and unconstitutionally, the lotto funds are being used by the President to make payments. I have tried to ascertain the identity of the officials complicit in this illegality by trying several sources to ascertain the signatories to “account 3119.” Everyone is afraid to speak. It is no wonder that the government would not bring Freedom of Information legislation, despite the President’s commitment announced to the international press.

2. In financial paper No. 6, $1.6 billion is included as additional inflows for the Low Income Housing Programme Revolving Fund. A revolving fund can only be established under an appropriation act which specifies the purposes and draw-down limit. There is no indication when such a fund was created or its limits. No such fund appears to have existed at the beginning of 2009 and there is some mystery about its origin and operations.

3. There is some apparent misunderstanding between inflows which should be paid into the Consolidated Fund and the related expenditure which should be the subject of the appropriation act. Any money received has first to go into the Consolidated Fund. Its expenditure is an entirely different matter.

4. The Finance Minister fails consistently to bring to the next sitting of the National Assembly advances out of the Contingency Fund. As a result we have in Financial Paper #1, Contingency Fund payments for a period of six months. During that period, the National Assembly had met on more than two dozen occasions. But this is the Minister’s artful but deceptive way to circumvent the limit on the number of supplementary appropriation bills he can introduce.

5. The annual Budget never states the amount in the Contingencies Fund. While the Audit Office annually refers to the abuse of this fund, that office seems not to understand what is meant by “advances” in the context of the fund. It is meant to be an amount paid in advance of appropriation at the next sitting, not some prepayment for future expenditure.

6. Arguably most of the Contingency Fund expenditure does not meet the strict test of “urgent, unavoidable and unforeseen” set out in section 41 of the FMAA. The case of the $400 million to the GRDB as Subsidies and Contributions to Local Organisations is instructive.

7. The Contingency Fund seems routinely used to make expenditure for subsequent financial years. The Minister of Health admitted as much in the case of purchases of drugs from the New GPC.

8. Act 3 of 2010 is interesting. It indicates that the government spends moneys contrary to law, not only in respect of the Contingencies Fund but for non-urgent expenditure. And just reflect on the first paragraph of this column: that every appropriation of public moneys authorised by Parliament for a fiscal year lapses and ceases to have effect as at the end of that fiscal year. Seems to suggest that the appropriation lapsed even before the National Assembly approved it.

9. In Financial Paper 5 there is, under the Office of the President, an amount of $353 million for the installation of fibre optic cables and termination, as a Contingency Fund provision. The explanation, or justification, by no less than the President, that this is to introduce “e-government,” ie, electronic government, is as absurd and misinformed as it is wasteful.

A criticism of this less than half-baked and non-technical description needs a separate column, but consider that the same week the announcement was made, the President was unveiling an advanced, multi-billion dollar, technically tested scheme by GT&T! Nor does the payment meet the test of “urgent, unavoidable and unforeseen,” and the Minister should be held accountable for this illegality since the law imposes on him exclusive responsibility over the Consolidated Fund.

Leading on from the issue of responsibility, next week’s concluding part will look at who is responsible and who can be penalised, and offer some of the recommendations to improve the financial management of the public finances of the country.

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Supplementary or contingency: same abuse – Part 2

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

Setting up of two funds
Occasioned by the walkout of the opposition from the National Assembly as it considered Supplementary Appropriation (No.3 of 2009) Bill 2010, for $8,245,758,278, some of which had already been spent (Contingencies) and to be spent (Supplementary Appropriations), I began an examination of the whole business of the constitution and the Fiscal Management and Accountability Act 2003 (FMAA). Together these provide the legal framework for the receipts and payments of public expenditure, and today I propose to examine the various provisions as a basis for consideration in the next part as to whether there is compliance with the constitution and the law in how the Minister of Finance treats with the Consolidated Fund and the Contingency Fund.

The constitution
The Consolidated Fund and the Contingency Fund are dealt with under Articles 216-219 and 220 respectively.

These five articles occur in Title 8 which is intituled simply ‘Finance.’ Together they deal with the establishment, funding and withdrawal of money from the Consolidated Fund or other public funds. For reminders, the Contingency Fund is not a separate fund but only a sub-fund of the Consolidated Fund.

The title of Article 220 is ‘Contingency Fund.’ It corresponds with the four articles on the Consolidated Fund and deals with the establishment of the Contingency Fund and its funding, which may be considered as one part, and withdrawing money out of it, which may be considered as the second and separate part of its provisions. One of the differences between the Consolidated Fund and the Contingency Fund is that while the constitution establishes the Consolidated Fund, Article 220 does not establish the Contingency Fund by its own provision, but leaves it to Parliament to decide whether or not it will establish the fund. “Parliament may by law establish” says the text of the article.

Because the Consolidated Fund is the repository of revenues or other moneys raised or received by Guyana and the source from which expenditure is made, the amount in this fund changes constantly. This is not the case with the Contingency Fund which has to be a specific amount, the quantum of which is determined, and therefore, limited by Parliament by law. We now look at those provisions in some detail.

Article 216 provides that “all revenues or other moneys raised or received by Guyana (not being revenues or other moneys that are payable, by or under an Act of Parliament, into some other fund established for any specific purpose or that may, by or under such an Act, be retained by the authority that received them for the purpose of defraying the expenses of that authority) shall be paid into and form one Consolidated Fund.”

This constitutional provision is systematically abused. It is now more than a decade since Auditor General Anand Goolsarran had cited the failure by the government to pay the government’s share of 24% of the proceeds of Guyana Lotteries to the Consolidated Fund, an assertion that has been repeated in every single annual report of the Audit Office. The 2007 report simply reminds Guyanese that no action was taken to pay over the amounts due to the Consolidated Fund but that such proceeds were paid into a special bank account No. 3119 and were used to meet public expenditure without parliamentary approval.

Watchdogs?
But instead of acting decisively on this matter the Audit Office accepts the inane response from the Ministry of Finance “that a policy decision is required on this matter, ” suggesting that the government or cabinet has some discretion on whether or not to comply with the constitution. Unfortunately, it is not only the Audit Office that bears responsibility for this sad state of affairs but so do the Public Accounts Committee and the National Assembly which are supposed to be our financial watchdogs. But so too does civil society, including those religious organisations which have accepted lotto funds for the construction of religious buildings.

While the lotto funds may be the most obvious and egregious case of violation when it comes to putting government revenues and receipts into the Consolidated Fund, it is not the only or obvious one. For example, the government with the cooperation of NICIL and the Privatisation Unit have been holding and spending public monies without the approval of the parliament and with no public oversight. That too runs into hundreds if not more than a billion dollars.

The Fiscal Management and Accountability Act 2003 which gives effect to the provisions of the constitution, provides that all budget agency receipts shall be credited to the Consolidated Fund. The agencies include the ministries, commissions, regions, the Guyana Defence Force and the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GHPC). My understanding is that the money from the lottery company is paid to the Ministry of Finance making the decision not to place the lotto money into the Consolidated Fund both unconstitutional and unlawful. I particularly identify the GHPC because it too is guilty of such a breach which is done with the full knowledge of both the Ministers of Finance and Health. In an environment in which the rule of law prevailed, both these Ministers would be guilty of an indictable offence and liable on conviction to a fine of two million dollars and to imprisonment for three years. But Guyana has no such environment.

Now for expenditure
Article 217 restricts the withdrawal of moneys from the Consolidated Fund to one of three cases:

(a) to meet expenditure that is charged upon the fund by this constitution or by any Act of Parliament;
(b) where the issue of those moneys has been authorised by an Appropriation Act;
(c) where the issue of those moneys has been authorised under article 219.

Paragraph (3) of this article requires an Act of Parliament before any money can be withdrawn from any public fund other than the Consolidated Fund while paragraph (4) empowers Parliament to prescribe the manner in which withdrawals may be made from the Consolidated Fund or any other public fund.

Article 218 deals with the Appropriation Act to give effect to the National Budget as well as any supplementary estimates.

Article 219 which deals with the authorisation of expenditure before the annual Appropriation Act is passed, empowers parliament to make provision for the Finance Minister to authorise withdrawal from the Consolidated Fund of moneys to meet expenditure necessary to carry on the services of the Government of Guyana up to April 30 of the year, or until the Appropriation Act for that year.

The provisions governing such expenditure are contained in the Fiscal Management and Accountability Act 2003 to which for the moment I now turn.

Fiscal Management and Accountability Act 2003
If anyone has any problems with interpreting the relevant constitutional provisions, section 16 of the FMAA should remove any doubts. It provides very simply that there shall be no expenditure of public moneys except in accordance with Article 217 of the constitution. It does not stop there but goes on to set out detailed provisions in sections 17 (the statutory framework for the annual appropriation to authorise the expenditure set out in the budget); 18 (proscribing any expenditure of any budget agency receipt except by way of an appropriation); 22 (authority to vary annual appropriations); 23 (Appropriation Amendment Acts) and 24 (Supplementary Appropriation Acts).

We the ordinary citizens need not feel badly if this sounds a tad too complicated. Not only do we not bear the statutory responsibility for ensuring the act is complied with, but from all the evidence it seems that all the persons with responsibility for doing so are equally confused or simply do not care.

The Appropriation Bill presented under section 17 is required to conform to international standards, but what these are and whether they are applied in Guyana has never been addressed in any published document of which I am aware. With great respect to our ministers, accounting officers, staff of the National Audit Office and members of the Public Accounts Committee, I am not sure that they too are aware of what such standards are, let alone best practice.

Varying expenditure
Subject to laid down conditions, section 22 gives the minister the power to reallocate authorised spending among annual appropriations. The main conditions are that these be within the same budget agencies, that no capital allocation can be used for recurrent expenditure, a ten per cent limit and that no new appropriations can be created. Such changes are themselves subject to what is called an Appropriation Amendment Bill to be presented to the National Assembly no later than the end of the eleventh month of the current fiscal year.

Any variation other than the reallocation referred to in section 22 must be authorised by a Supplementary Appropriation Act prior to the incurring of any expenditure thereunder. As we noted last week, on the introduction of a Supplementary Appropriation Bill, the minister must present to the National Assembly the reasons for the proposed variations and provide a supplementary document describing the impact that the variations, if approved, will have on the financial plan outlined in the annual budget.

Neither the current Minister of Finance nor his predecessor has ever complied with the requirement to publish such a document. Again, one has to ask where is the National Assembly in all of this and whether the clerk and/or the speaker, the parliamentary opposition and the Public Accounts Committee ought not to do something about this persistent abuse. Dr. Ashni Singh gives the appearance of not being influenced by any law, professional or public opinion in terms of how, what and when he does anything. It is one of the failings of these types of legislation that they provide no automatic sanction for patent and systematic breaches. Nor do they lend themselves, without the availability of substantial private resources, to being responsive to legal sanctions.

Next week we will look at the Contingency Fund and close by examining the extent to which the cause of the walkout that sparked this series has any merit.

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Supplementary or contingency: Same abuse

Sunday, January 17th, 2010

Introduction
So often we hear time-worn sayings like ‘Chickens coming home to roost,’ ‘History repeating itself’ and ‘Forgetting the lessons of history,’ and we think they are just platitudes of no consequence. Yet the brouhaha in the National Assembly last Monday showed how some such things are not only more than idle talk, but rather powerful enough to have an after life.

The occasion for the war of words in the National Assembly was consideration of Supplementary Appropriation (No.3 of 2009) Bill 2010, for $8,245,758,278 as further and additional funding for various purposes, some of which had already been spent (Contingencies) and to be spent (Supplementary Appropriations).

On one side there were Prime Minister Sam Hinds, Housing Minister Irfan Ali and Health Minister Dr Leslie Ramsammy, three persons whose ministerial portfolios were significant would-be beneficiaries of the bulk of the supplementary funds. Over the other side were two attorneys-at-law, Opposition Members of Parliament Winston Murray (PNCR) and Khemraj Ramjattan (AFC), both of whom eventually left the arena in anger and frustration, threatening to take the fight elsewhere.

Déjà vu
To understand the exchanges one needs to delve a little bit into history, going back to the National Development Strategy which was adopted by the National Assembly a couple of years ago. Chapter 13 of that strategy dealing with Fiscal Policy and The Public Sector had this to say about the Contingency Fund which is so often confused – either by design or otherwise – with Supplementary Appropriations.

“Deficiencies in the Budget Process: Largely due to deficiencies in the budgetary process, the Contingencies Fund has been used to meet all kinds of expenditures, such as shortfalls in ministries’ provisions arising from basic miscalculations in estimates and unrealistic budget assumptions about exchange rate changes, inflation and spending patterns, and the introduction during the course of the year of new projects or programmes deemed ‘necessary’ or ‘relevant’ by a political or high-ranking technical functionary. Instead of being used for emergencies, such as a major breach in the sea defence system – the use intended by the National Assembly – the Contingency Fund now serves as a source of financing for unauthorised (by Parliament) and additional expenditures.”

More and more we have to admire, and owe a debt of gratitude to, the scores of persons who contributed to that document. Had we taken the NDS seriously we would long have been on an environmentally-conscious development trajectory rather than travelling to dictatorships like Iran to beg for money to sustain our economy.

The first walkout
The French have a wonderful way of expressing the English equivalent of “the more things change the more they remain the same.” And that introduces the second bit of history, this time in December 2003 when the Fiscal Management and Accountability Act 2003 came up for consideration in the National Assembly. The Stabroek News of December 16 of that year reported the PPP/C refusing a request from the Opposition PNCR to send the 87-clause bill to a select committee for detailed consideration. The Minister of Finance then was Mr Saisnarine Kowlessar and the reason he advanced for the government’s refusal of the request was that urgent passage was necessary to pave the way for debt relief of US$30 million from the World Bank and the IMF for the next twenty years. That explanation appears as strange as the request was sensible but then the National Assembly has never been the forum for the most sensible decisions or debate in Guyana.

Given no more than forty-eight hours to study and debate the bill, Mr Winston Murray, the PNC Shadow Finance Minister walked out in protest, allowing the overwhelming passage of the bill that may soon be at the centre of a legal action by the Alliance For Change. Ironically, the PPP/C may itself be a loser for not having read and understood what is clearly a complex and possibly badly worded piece of legislation. Indeed a statement given by Mr Robert Corbin, the PNCR leader on the recent exchange suggests that, at the very least, the act lends itself to continued misunderstanding in how billions of taxpayers’ funds are spent and accounted for. Over the next couple of weeks Business Page will examine some of the main provisions of the act, the principal objective of which is better transparency and accountability for the receipts and payments of the state in the Consolidated Fund which has as a sub-fund a Contingency Fund.

The Supplementary Appropriation
Section 24 of the FMAA requires that the variation of an appropriation other than reallocation of approved appropriations must be authorised by a supplementary appropriation act prior to the incurring of any expenditure. And that is where the experienced Prime Minister, the adventurous Health Minister and the green Housing Minister appear to have run into problems, confusing the supplementary funding with the kind of expenditure for which the Contingency Fund was specifically set up.

It seems too that the Finance Minister Dr Ashni Singh is also not sufficiently familiar with the act’s provisions on supplementary appropriations since he consistently fails to comply with the requirement that on the introduction of a supplementary appropriation bill, he is required to present to the National Assembly the reasons for the proposed variations and “a supplementary document describing the impact that the variations, if approved, will have on the financial plan outlined in the national budget.”

And before we go on perhaps it would be useful to note that Ram & McRae in Budget Focus 2008 had identified the absence of meaningful debate and real accounting for such additional funds.

Did it not strike our parliamentarians as odd that they should pass legislation that requires a request for $100 million in the budget to be subject to extensive scrutiny and debate but for an $8 billion supplementary request to be supported by only very limited information and subject only to questions and not a debate?

Cocking a snook at Parliament
Because of the supremacy of the constitution which empowers and regulates the raising of revenues and the incurring of expenditure by the government, we will also be looking at how the FMAA gives effect to and is circumscribed by the constitution. In researching for this column I found an interesting article by Indian Professor P.K. Tripathi and titled Lawless withdrawals from public funds: Cocking a snook at Parliament. It is apparent from that article that the application of responsible public accounting begins with the appreciation of a fundamental point about democracy and the rule of law.

As Tripathi points out, in a democracy the government must function both in respect of determination of its policies and the administration of those policies strictly under the control of the representatives of the people. The democratic process requires that no public monies can be spent without a grant made by the Parliament following a request by the government in the form of an Appropriation Bill or a Supplementary Appropriation Bill presented to the National Assembly specifying the purposes for which it plans to spend and the amounts of money it plans to spend on each of those purposes.

One exception for the prior approval of the National Assembly is in respect of monies out of the Contingencies Fund. I will look at the governing constitutional and statutory procedures next week, but for now it is not at all clear that those on the government side of the House, including the Prime Minister and Leader of the House Samuel Hinds and the Finance Minister Dr Ashni Singh, Dr Leslie Ramsammy and Mr Irfan Ali are familiar with those provisions. The two financial papers which were embodied in Supplementary Appropriation Bill #3 were in respect of both advances from the Contingency Fund and Supplementary Provisions for the year 2009. If we accept the position in the law that supplementary provision must be approved prior to expenditure it would seem beyond logic that one can be asking for supplementary provision for 2009 in 2010!

The New GPC again
Included in Financial Paper No. 5/2009 for $1.449 billion were amounts totalling $473 million for purchases of drugs mainly from the New Guyana Pharmaceutical Corporation towards which this government had earlier found itself acting illegally. Is history now repeating itself with breaches of the Contingency Fund being involved in payments made to the company between December 28 and 31 to procure drugs to last up to April 2010? What neither Dr Ramsammy nor Dr Ashni Singh told the National Assembly is when the drawing rights for these were requested, and issued in accordance with section 41 of the FMAA.

It may well turn out to be entirely ironic that one of the few amendments proposed by Mr Winston Murray and accepted by the government when the FMAA Bill was debated in 2003 may come back to haunt the government. And that is in relation to penalties for breaches.

The act makes it an indictable offence punishable on conviction to a fine of two million dollars and to imprisonment for three years for any official to knowingly permit any other person to contravene any provision of the act.

Maybe the Prime Minister sensed the rising temperature and not so implicit threats during the exchange in the National Assembly, taking refuge in the need to consult legally.

Those who have honed their political skills and owe their allegiance to the architects of the more permissive recent financial arrangements do not appear so compelled.

To be continued

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Financial lawlessness on the increase

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

The Fiscal Management and Accountability Act, 2003 (FMAA), along with the Integrity Commission Act and the Audit Act, are often advertised by the government as proof of its commitment to transparency and accountability. This trilogy of legislation is underpinned and intended to give effect to a constitutional provision for the proper accounting of public moneys. To prevent any doubt about what public moneys means the FMAA defines it as “all moneys belonging to the State received or collected by officials in their official capacity including tax and non-tax revenue collections authorised by law and… grants to the Government…”. That clearly includes money from Lotto and privatisation and any funds received from the Norwegians and other sources towards the Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS).

Not only that. The various acts referred to above are all part of the commitment of the Government of Guyana to the international donor community – the IMF, the World Bank, the IDB, the EU, Canada, the US and others – for good governance including transparency in accounting, in exchange for financial support. The Minister of Finance is the member of the Cabinet designated by law for ensuring that the constitutional and statutory requirements are complied with and is empowered by the act to take punitive action against those who breach its provisions. Having played a major role in the passage of the accountability legislation, the donors are assumed to be familiar with the main provisions of the legislation and must therefore be aware of the major infractions of the legislation by the very Minister bound to ensure compliance.

Spend, baby spend
The national budget continues to grow at a considerable rate helped by VAT producing immoral windfalls to the government. With a penchant for huge numbers and throwing money after problems, for President Jagdeo the policy has been ‘spend, baby spend.’ Like the World Cup money and the flood funds, accountability and audit will come later, if at all. No one would have identified Dr Ashni Singh, Minister of Finance with the ‘spend, baby spend’ attitude, or given his background as a professionally qualified accountant and former Deputy Auditor General, have expected that he would treat accountability and the audit of the books of the state with such disdain. It is neither excusable nor understandable.

Yet Dr Ashni Singh has breached several of the statutory duties and professional obligations imposed on him in defiance of public opinion and the rule of law, and confident of no warning letter from the President, his political boss. Dr Singh’s apparent contempt for good governance and accountability makes many hesitate to support the LCDS which places the centre of the LCDS in the Office of the President, the very office that now unconstitutionally (mis)appropriates the Lotto Funds, using it for all sorts of improper purposes at the fancy of the President.

Lotto
Article 217 of the Constitution of Guyana – the country’s supreme law – requires that “all revenues or other moneys raised or received by Guyana (not being revenues or other moneys that are payable, by or under an Act of Parliament, into some other fund established for any specific purpose or that may, by or under such an Act, be retained by the authority that received them for the purpose of defraying the expenses of that authority) shall be paid into and form one Consolidated Fund.” I do not believe that the term “for any specific purpose” can be interpreted so widely as to allow an Act of Parliament to defeat the main constitutional objective to ensure that moneys coming in to the state go only into the Consolidated Fund and any spending done out of that Fund is on the basis of appropriations by the National Assembly.

In defiance of the constitution the 24% of gross takings collected by the government from the Guyana Lottery Company are made available to the President who seems to exercise total control of how it is spent with only any unspent balance being put into the Consolidated Fund. I have heard this practice defended under the second parenthetical exception to Article 217 and that the money should go to the Government Lotteries Control Committee under the Government Lotteries Act Cap. 80:07. That argument in my view falls at the first hurdle since that act deals only with lotteries “organised and conducted by the Government Lotteries Control Committee.” The Lotto Funds as they are infamously referred to, represent the government’s share of the gross takings from a private lottery run under a contract between the Canadian operator and the government. It is a tax/levy and should rightly go straight into the Consolidated Fund. The President’s misuse of these funds is a clear breach of the constitution which he has taken an oath to uphold, while the failure by the Minister of Finance to bring these moneys into the Consolidated Fund constitutes a dereliction of his duty and obligation and contrary to section 48 of the FMAA which makes it unlawful for any minister or official to misuse, misapply, or improperly dispose of public moneys.

The mid-year report
The Fiscal Management and Accountability Act 2003 imposes on the Minister a mandatory duty to present to the National Assembly, no later than August 30 of the half year, a report on the year-to-date execution of the annual budget and the prospects for the remainder of the year. This column has been at pains to point out that not only is the Minister in breach of this statutory duty with regard to timing, but even when he belatedly submits the report, it is frequently misdated to minimise the delay and omits key information prescribed by the act. The act requires the report to include “an update on the current macroeconomic and fiscal situation, a revised economic outlook for the remainder of the fiscal year, and a statement of the projected impact that these trends are likely to have on the annual budget for the current fiscal year.”

This is a practical proposition and the report should comment on emerging issues such as the alleged $300 million fraud at the GRA, the President’s $2 billion housing fund for the vulnerable, the gains from the LCDS and any unbudgeted expenditure incurred in the first half of the year. This kind of information is not only for the business community and the citizenry but also the kind of information any Finance Minister as the country’s Chief Finance Officer needs for his short-term planning.

Unintended consequences
The delay by the Minister causes the Bank of Guyana (BoG) to delay the publication of its own half-year report until the Minister releases his. I understand the BoG’s report has been ready for some time and while the Bank is an independent statutory body, it comes within the ministerial control of the Finance Minister, a choice between losing its reputation for independence and offending the Minister.

A similar situation exists with the Bureau of Statistics. This entity has received several millions of dollars to enhance its professional competence and secure its independence. I think it was in 1991 that an act was passed to make the bureau a body corporate, independent and effective. The minister responsible for the act is the Minister of Finance who in the absence of a chairman appointed by him is automatically the chairman. There is nothing to indicate that a board was ever appointed and by default the bureau remains as a unit of the Ministry of Finance, mistakenly described on its website as a “Government of Guyana Agency.” It should not therefore come as a surprise that the bureau is far from effective in how it carries out its mandate, selectively choosing if and when to publish important statistical information, a decision apparently not unrelated to the wishes of the Minister.

Perhaps more out of frustration than from a practical consideration a source close to the Bank of Guyana has suggested that these two bodies should report direct to the National Assembly. This may very well be a suggestion that the Speaker of the National Assembly or the Public Accounts Committee may wish to take up, even if in the first instance it is done privately. What is clear is that the failure of these bodies to discharge their statutory duties does little to contradict those who argue that what Guyana has is paper accountability only.

The Office of the Auditor General
Not only is this office subject to its own act but it is also a constitutional body with serious responsibilities and functions. One of the first but fundamental points to note about the head of this office is that the constitution makes no provision for an acting Auditor General and the job description clearly requires a professionally qualified accountant. In fact the incumbent has no such qualification and it would be a travesty for him to be appointed substantively to the position. It may be convenient for the government to have him there, but surely it is dangerous for the taxpayers of the country and severely compromises the quality of its reports. By retaining him the government is aware that the real authority in the Audit Office is no less a person than the spouse of the Minister of Finance. It is hard to believe that neither of them nor anyone in the government, nor in the international donor community that keeps putting money into the Office, recognises this obvious conflict of interest or simply is not interested even in token accountability.

Even with that major weakness the Audit Office is operating at half its required manpower and this helps to explain why it keeps falling back and down on many of its public commitments. Like the Minister of Finance’s mid-year report, the Audit Office’s report on the Government accounts for 2008 is also late. By law this must be submitted to the National Assembly within nine months of the end of the accounting year. We are now in the eleventh month without any word about when this report will be available.

One of the mandates of the Office is to conduct Value-For-Money (VFM) audits and it must now be coming on to a year or more since the Office has been due to issue its report on a VFM audit conducted on the financially miniscule Palms.

Even with expensive Canadian assistance the Office has been unable to deliver. VFM audits are of less value where the expenditure is unavoidable, as it is with the Palms, the main expenditure on which comprises staffing (it is understaffed) and meals (which are as low-cost as one can get). VFMs are useful in the case of discretionary expenditure such as Cabinet Outreach and the choice of newspapers for government advertisements. With weak and compromised leadership, the Office is clearly not in a position to deliver on its mandate.

Conclusion
Transparency and accountability are not esoteric or theoretical concepts but are practical, part of the democratic landscape and help to ensure that money is properly accounted for and sensibly spent. Our national budget exceeds $100 billion and if we take the most conservative estimate of 10% as lost through poor financial management, the country loses $10 billion per year. Think what that can do to reduce taxation or enhance social spending. The Minister of Finance has a wonderful opportunity to redeem his reputation.

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Clico, contagion, containment and concealment

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

If a loss of public moneys should occur and, at the time of that loss, a Minister or official has caused or contributed to that loss through misconduct or through deliberate or serious disregard of reasonable standards of care, that Minister or official shall be personally liable to the Government for the amount of the loss.

Introduction
This is a direct quote from section 49 of the Fiscal Management and Accountability Act which President Jagdeo signed into law in late December 2003. The Clico affair and related matters may be a good time to draw attention to the provision which has never been tested at the higher levels. When the dust settles, the taxpayers, NIS contributors and beneficiaries, members of pension and medical schemes and depositors in Clico and potentially in Hand-in-Hand Trust (HIHT) and the New Building Society could lose collectively several billions from the fall-out in the financial sector.

Other consequences will be equally severe, if not always as direct. Jobs will have to go. Moreover, with perhaps billions invested in Stanford Investment Bank (Stanford) by the HIHT and other so far unidentified pension schemes and individuals, their losses and their income stream − all in US dollars – will be gone. With the assertion that our economy is ring-fenced having proved naively misleading, and claims by Clico, the President, the Minister of Finance and the Commissioner of Insurance − all acknowledged as very bright persons − having proved to have been misguided at best and been guilty of misrepresentations at worst, there is a loss of confidence not only in the judgment and competence of our economic managers, but also in the independence and ability of the regulators to protect the public interest.

Last Wednesday, Ms Maria van Beek, the Commissioner of Insurance, presented a petition to the court seeking an order that Clico be wound up or alternatively, that a Judicial Manager be appointed. One day later, Ms van Beek was granted her wish by Chief Justice Ian Chang in an order returnable tomorrow, Monday, appointing her as Judicial Manager of the entity which she has supervised for more than five years. Instead of immediately issuing a statement advising affected persons – numbering tens of thousands – of the implications that flow from the order, Ms van Beek proceeded to the Office of the President for a press conference, where along with the Minister of Finance Dr Ashni Singh and the Governor of the Bank of Guyana (the Bank) Mr Lawrence Williams, she sat silently as the President made excuse after excuse for the failure of Clico and gave vague statements about protecting pensioners without once using the G word – guarantee − which is what people, worried about their savings, pensions, medical schemes and jobs most need.

Blame The Bahamas
President Jagdeo, who is not the responsible Minister, told the nation that it was the collapse of Clico Bahamas that triggered the action by the commissioner. Yet that is not what the commissioner said in an affidavit sworn to the court one day earlier. She said it was the business model and investment policies pursued by the company. The President, seeking to protect Ms van Beek and by extension his Minister of Finance, told the nation that the commissioner had told Clico more than one year ago that they should have regularised their investment position. So, did the commissioner write the company and then sit back as they breached the law even further? The problem with the President’s style of intervention is that at best, he does not check the accuracy and implications of the statements he makes and increasingly often, he is wrong. There is no need to remind anyone of the damage caused by such lack of respect for accuracy as we saw in the saga of tax concessions necessitating an amendment in the law to facilitate Queens Atlantic Investment Inc’s tax concessions.

In matters financial details are important and so is judgment, particularly when it involves self-serving statements. When the President assured the nation on February 5 that Clico’s assets were sufficient to meet its liabilities he was repeating a company line without having read the December 31, 2007 analysis showing that 81% of the company’s assets was invested in related parties, all of which were under various degrees of threat (SN February 7 and Business Page Feb 8 reported on this analysis). In fact as Minister-Extraordinaire he should have known that the 2008 figures had shown some deterioration, suggesting that the commissioner’s call was ineffective and/or ignored. Both he and the Minister of Finance should have wondered how a company that issued “insurance policies” with premiums running into billions of dollars only needed a statutory fund of under fifty million dollars.

Disregard for reasonable care
The disregard for reasonable care does not end with them. The nation would have expected the Commissioner of Insurance and the Bank of Guyana to recognise that those policies were investment products dressed up as insurance. It is hard to believe that such a major issue would have escaped the attention of the Bank with illustrious directors of the calibre of Drs Gobin Ganga, Prem Misir and Cyril Solomon.

Given the poor oversight exercised by the regulators in general and the Commissioner of Insurance in particular, the court would have been reluctant to appoint Ms Van Beek to manage the operations of Clico under its supervision. Her demonstrable failures to act expose her inappropriateness for such a job, or even to have been the lead regulator for an industry which also required legal expertise. The problem for the court is that the law appears to have given it little choice. Yes, the court could have made a winding up order on the ground that Clico is insolvent, and use the more practical test of “inability to pay one’s debt on demand” that may very well have been the case. But the Insurance Act makes it a bit more difficult for the court by requiring a determination of the value of a troubled company’s assets and liabilities, never an easy task even for accountants. The President compounded the difficulty by volunteering that he hoped that the entire sum from The Bahamas company would be recovered even as he failed to address the billion dollar debt owed by CRL, the Guyana forestry product subsidiary of the troubled CL Financial which has guaranteed the debt.

Once the court chose not to go with the winding-up option – though this may still happen at some time – section 68 of the act gave it no choice but to appoint the commissioner as the Judicial Manager. Apart from the fact that her past supervision of Clico inspires little confidence, and her inattention to detail was embarrassingly exposed when she wrongly identified the name of Clico in her petition, what then becomes of her statutory role and function as Commissioner of Insurance over Clico and the rest of the industry, including Fidelity, which would ordinarily require full-time attention? Additionally, there appears to be a conflict between her two roles which the court would have to consider given that the court itself is not equipped to make business judgments.

NIS
The poor NIS could stand to lose six billion dollars in investments in Clico which may not have been made in compliance with the NIS Act. This is no small change. It is the equivalent of more than 20% of earnings accumulated over forty years by the Scheme and about one year’s benefits payment. To check on the propriety of the investments, I wrote Minister of Finance Dr Ashni Singh a letter on February 24, pointing out that the NIS Act only allows the NIS to invest in securities approved of by the Co-operative Finance Administration (COFA) established under the Co-operative Financial Institutions. I pointed out that he is not only the Chairman of COFA but as Minister, appoints the Board of COFA. The Minister of course also appoints the Board of the NIS. I asked him the following questions:

1. The names of the persons he appointed to COFA currently serving as members of the administration, and the commencement and termination dates of their appointments.

2. The securities which COFA approved for purposes of investment.

3. Whether the NIS had sought and received approval for any investments other than those determined by the administration and if so, the securities which have been so approved.

4. Whether the administration during his tenure as Minister has ever taken the opportunity under section 4 of the act for its Chairman or Secretary to attend any meeting of the National Insurance Board, and in particular the meeting at which any decision was made by the board for any special investments.

I am awaiting his response. But if it were owing to the Minister’s “misconduct or through deliberate or serious disregard of reasonable standards of care” COFA did not approve of NIS investing in Clico the Minister would have some serious questions to answer, not to Business Page but to the nation.

To make matters worse for the NIS, Clico was allowed, even while Commissioner van Beek, the Minister of Finance, the President and the Bank of Guyana were “monitoring” the imperilled insurance company, to divest itself of $1.5 billion dollars of bonds in the Berbice Bridge Company Inc. The Board of the NIS, all the members of which are either ducking or hiding, needs to explain to the nation whether the terms of their $6 billion investment in Clico were breached by the sale of the bonds and whether the Scheme feels that its investment is any safer now.

The New Building Society
More than ten years after privately as a director of NBS and publicly as a columnist, I advocated that the country’s only building society with more than one hundred thousand persons’ savings and loans involved be brought under the supervision of the Bank of Guyana, the Bank exercises no jurisdiction over the NBS. During that time the government has drastically increased the lending limits while relaxing the conditions and security required to back the loans made. One only has to consider the Savings and Loans crisis in the US in the late eighties to appreciate the possible consequences of such laxity. But there is more to worry about. The board has also become increasingly politicized with its current Chairman being Head of the Public Service in the Office of the President and the decision about the new Head Office involving hundreds of millions of dollars being made against technical professional advice. Quietly, the NBS has been joined in the failed attempt to prevent the demise of Clico. The NBS has bought over $1.5 billion dollars of bonds in the Berbice Bridge Company Inc from Clico, and it is unlikely that this would have happened without the official agreement and sanction of the Office of the President in which both the Chairman of the NIS and the Chairman and one director of the NBS are based, or the Ministry of Finance which has to approve investment in securities issued by the Berbice Bridge Company.

The danger is obvious. The NBS with assets in excess of $30 billion is unsupervised and unregulated but subject to powerful political influences. If the bridge company which is proving the sceptics right about the hugely optimistic traffic projections, and the board, which is chaired by the Clico CEO, cannot meet its financial obligations to bondholders, $1.8 billion of the funds of the NBS – representing about 40% of its reserves – would be at risk. That is real money which added to the Head Office being constructed at a cost of approximately $800 million could pose real trouble for the society.

Once again the recurring players are the President, the Minister of Finance and the Bank of Guyana, the last-named of which has failed to assume any jurisdiction as it should have. Of course this in no way exonerates the Chairman and directors of the NBS from their fiduciary obligations.

Hand-in-Hand Trust
The President also referred at the press conference to the investments made in Stanford by the Hand-in-Hand Trust, which holds depositors’ funds and manages some of the country’s largest pension schemes. He said that in the case of the HIHT, “total current exposure” to the Stanford Group amounts to $827 million or US$4 million, in addition to $297 million or US$1.5 million invested on behalf of pension funds. He then went on to confuse the nation by referring to the direct exposure which he said represented 9 per cent of the total assets of HIHT.” Whether it is 9% or closer to 10% is less important than the fact that this is not how one measures exposure. With the head of the Bank of Guyana and the Minister of Finance sitting in at the press conference as his technical advisors, the President as an economist should know that the measure should have been total exposure of the company – direct and indirect – relative not against total assets which do not belong to the company but only to equity which does. In other words he was downplaying the problem in more than one way.

The question has also been raised whether it was permissible for the HIHT, regulated by the Bank of Guyana under the Financial Institutions Act, to place so much of its funds in a single investment – what lay persons would refer to as putting too many eggs in one basket, but which the more technically-minded Bank of Guyana would call asset concentration. In the case of the failed Globe Trust, the Bank of Guyana received more than a mild criticism from then Chief Justice Carl Singh for its poor oversight. It must now hope that by some miracle the investment by HIHT in Stanford will be recovered. If that does not happen, then the Bank can expect not only a strong rebuke but perhaps even a lawsuit.

Conclusion
Faced with a financial crisis, the first step is containment. Instead we had concealment with the consequence that it has widened and enlarged now including, with potential negative and costly consequences, the National Insurance Scheme, the New Building Society, pension schemes and savings accounts of hundreds of thousands. Confidence is also crucial but this comes only from the competence, judgement and independence of our leaders and regulators. None of these qualities has been adequately demonstrated in this instance by the President, the Minister of Finance, the Commissioner of Insurance, the Bank of Guyana, the National Insurance Scheme and the New Building Society.

The rest of the financial sector and perhaps with one exception the insurance sector all appear very solid. Every effort must be made not to contaminate them and to restore confidence in the entire system. I believe that the National Assembly needs to take an active role in this.

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