By Max Patrick Ocaido
The Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has on Monday grilled officials from the Judiciary over misappropriation of Shs34billion as highlighted in the 2017/2018 Auditor General's report.
This arises from AG’s report that noted how expenditure totaling to Shs34bn was incurred on various items without appropriately applying the government chart of Accounts as prescribed by the Accountant General. Apparently, the description of the expenditure items were not consistent with the item coding in the chart resulting into mischarge and the Accounting officer didn’t seek for authority to reallocate resources to the required expenditures items.
The officials from Judiciary led by the Permanent Secretary Kagole Kivumbi went through a torrid 5hour grill as the latter labored to explain how some of the said funds were spent on unforeseeable activities such as recruitment of judges. However, the committee chaired by Budadiri West MP Nandala Mafabi was not convinced saying that it was illegally done.
This back and forth meeting prompted MP Mafabi to invite the Director of Criminal Investigations Department, Grace Akullo to take part in the next proceedings after the MPs suspected collusion by the officials to embezzle public funds.
“We are seeing that the budget of judiciary which was Shs135Bn, 25.6% was diverted which clearly shows that Judiciary lied to Parliament. Justice is for all of us that is why we are saying this diversion calls for total investigation, so tomorrow, we want her (Akullo) to be around so that she takes over the matter as a directive from Parliament,” Mafabi said.
In his response, Kagole refuted the figure saying the only money mischarged was Shs28.2bn, some of which was spent on HIV medical allowances, monitoring and evaluation among other items.
“The expenditure relates on court operations funds, mediation funds, court sessions, impress funds, locus visits, HIV medical allowances and expenditures for monitoring and evaluation,” Kagole said.
Among other queries that the Judiciary will explain tomorrow (Tuesday) include Shs3.4bn spent on inspection of various courts by accounts section, internal audit, operations funds for other courts and renovation of Bugiri court, Shs5.9bn advanced to various courts Supreme, Court of Appeal, Commercial Court, Anti-corruption court, Civil Court, Criminal Division, Land Division, family court to enable operations and to the Judicial Studies Institute for training activities.
