Senator Asks for More timely Audits of Government’s Accounts

Kevin Herrera

The Senate debate over the 2023-2024 national budget saw parliamentarians for both major political parties and those from the churches and civil society underscore the portions of the document that they supported or had concerns over. For Senator Kevin Herrera who represents the business community, there were concerns with the backlog of audits. He expressed hope that for next year’s budget, there would be more timely audits on government funds.

Kevin Herrera, Senator, Business Sector

“I’m hoping that for the next budget next year we’ll be further along with the audits of the government accounts. We want to – the Joint Public Accounts Committee has been working hard, meeting regularly to try to push that process and bring it up to where we need to have it. So, we’ve had some commitments from the Accountant General that the accounts will be presented very shortly, so hopefully we could be close to up to date by this time next year. I’m not sure about the audits part of it but certainly we’ve gotten that assurance from her that we’ll be close to there with the accounts. We want to make sure that the audits will be very close behind. The Auditor-General has indicated that she needs about three months to complete an audit, so I guess we could calculate that we’re about five, six years behind. So it will take some time but I think we’ll be much further along by next year this time.”