The joint Public Accounts Committee met on Friday in Belmopan. It's the most powerful committee in the house - because through years of political reform it has come to be chaired by the opposition and populated by a majority of non government members.
That alone makes it the most powerful house committee - and on Friday - when they met to examine the reports of Auditor General, Maria Rodriguez and review matters with regards to the spending of public funds, she gave a withering account of the state of government record keeping and accountability for public spending.
She offered the following assessment in reference to the 2016 - 2017 audit of the government's finances, which - as she described it - is made up of just numbers on a paper - with no verification:
Kevin Herrera, Senator
"What and what a disclaimer means and I know you explain why you give one, but what does a disclaimer mean?"
Maria Rodriguez, Auditor General
"It essentially means that I cannot confirm the reliability of the financial statements nor their accuracy."
Kevin Herrera, Senator
"And does that also mean that these financial statements cannot be relied on by users?"
Maria Rodriguez, Auditor General
"Fully agree. Fully agree. The statements, the way they are presented, we cannot rely on them at this point."
Kevin Herrera, Senator
"So to a large extent, these financial statements are relatively useless except that it gives an insight into the situation that exists."
Maria Rodriguez, Auditor General
"Yes, yes. It's just, it's basically numbers that we cannot confirm. And as such, as Auditor General, I don't want to say everything is okay because we cannot confirm them. The lack of reconciliations, the lack of source documents.
"What I think is happening or happened back then is that they were posting but did not have any intent of retaining the source document. Typical examples, if when you go to make a simple purchase to any business, if you don't get an invoice back from that business to go and pay, you don't know what you're paying for."
"And we've done investigations where the invoices that are attached to the SmartStream payment, and then you visit the business, the business has a complete different source document than what the accounting officers have in their ministry."
"So you find that while we're paying for a tablet, that person actually got a laptop. At this point, even the losses, if there was any, we cannot even quantify to the assembly as to whether there was any loss because we cannot go through a bank statement."
"We cannot go through check stubs. We cannot go through reconciliations to see what has transpired. So there is a high possibility that fraud may have occurred and we cannot pick up on it. It is really a big systematic issue."
"Nobody is really worrying or concerned about these source documents. And it's not something 10 years ago. It is existing right now. We can visit entities and they are saying they don't have source, they don't have documents for present year."
