12 Mar 2019

A budget of P90 million has been proposed for the Office of the Auditor General for the 2019/20 financial year.

Presenting the budget proposals on March 11, Assistant Minister for Presidential Affairs, Governance and Public Administration, Mr Machana Shamukuni said the amount comprised P88 million recurrent budget and P2 million as the development budget.

Mr Shamukuni said under the recurrent budget, salaries and allowances had been allocated P57.1 million, travelling and transport P10.8 million, general expenses and supplies P9.1 million, departmental services P5.3 million as well as special expenditure at an amount of P1.8 million.

Regarding the development budget, he explained that the P2 million requested would cover the procurement of additional automated audit management software and integrated data extraction and analysis software.

He, however, hastened to indicate that software was covered under the ministry’s development budget. 

On the Office of the Auditor General’s achievements during the 2018/19 financial year, Mr Shamukuni noted that of the 57 audits that were planned, 44 were done, adding that the remaining were at various stages of completion.

Moreover, he indicated that for local authorities, the office had planned to carry out 33 audits across 28 local authorities, saying the audits would be from 2016/17 to 2017/18 financial years with the exception of Lobatse Town Council.

He said 20 of the planned audits had been done up to field work and were at reporting stage while five were currently under field work, which was due to be completed by the end of this month.

In addition, Mr Shamukuni said Botswana Railways and Air Botswana had also been audited as per the mandate of the office to select a few parastatals whose books had over time been showing a decline. 

Furthermore, the assistant minister explained that the manpower rationalisation exercise had started in earnest with the recruitment of 15 information technology auditors and 15 performance auditors.

Noting that the recruitment would help bolster the output of the office in terms of numbers and quality of reports, he observed however that it would be implemented in instalments throughout the entire NDP 11. ENDS