NO END TO LOOTING OF GOVT FUNDS

Sir,

There is rot to come as a result of the ‘reopening’ of the CTA Trading Account. The collusion with people who should otherwise be protecting State funds gives me goose bumps. This is scary, and the biggest frustration is that government audits are so far behind. 

While I am inclined to think that the current auditor general alongside the PAC are doing a tremendous job, I still feel that their actions are not timely; the reason fraud will continue unabated. I mean how does it benefit the electorate when revealing or unearthing the looting of funds that have been squandered? Timely detection on the other hand would not help very much.

In the meanwhile criminals will continue looting and would-be-fraudsters will continue to set up ghost companies to stash out  loots from government because they know that by the time the auditor general gets to their case they would have covered their tracks, and witnesses could be dead by then. The question is why is the internal audit function not picking up on these matters? Is this function so weak that it only takes the auditor general alone to bring these misdemeanors to light? 

function

Government has, without hesitation, a weak control environment; and that is not in dispute. But I still feel organising the audit function better would help in the detection of theft and looting earlier than what is happening at present. 

I know government is a huge entity but capacitating the audit function adequately would save us the millions of Emalangeni we are losing. Even getting external audit firms do an audit of government once, say in four years, would not be out of place given the amounts of money government is losing currently. 

The more I think about this, the more I feel a lot needs to be done, particularly with regard to getting convictions of suspects. 

In closing, with CTA winning the Trading Account case, I think we haven’t seen the end of the looting, the reason I think we need to deepen detection and convictions to arrest the run-away crime. 

The sad thing is that suspects continue leading extravagant and lavish lifestyles reminiscent of film stars; some have built mansions and flats on Swazi Nation Land from proceeds of such loot; and the rest of us can’t help but envy them. And our young ones are watching, I suppose they refer to these criminals as ‘tikhokho’.

P Shongwe  

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