THE nation must be numb by now. Without fail, the auditor general's reports disclose the shocking financial mismanagement of government entities, year after year.
Be it series 1, 2 or whatever number comes attached to the reports, the financial mismanagement mess is the same. "When will it all stop" feeling is a frequent post-report syndrome. What is worse is, the people will eventually be asked to foot the bill for the wastage and leakages.
The sad part is that some of the wastage and leakages could have been easily spotted by supervisors, let alone the top management. The latest AG's Report released on Thursday did, in fact, highlight the lack of monitoring, supervision and coordination. Take the HRD Corp issue.
According to the AG's Report, which covers audits for 2019 to 2023, HRD Corp paid RM51.69 million for a training programme for 3,726 participants. Some of them, as the report points out, attended the programme 16 times! This is a mind-boggler on this side of the century. If the AG's Report was a bombshell, the Public Accounts Committee's disclosure earlier was a lightning bolt: HRD Corp, a government company under the Human Resources Ministry, had been using a significant amount of the levy it collected from companies as part of the Human Resources Development Fund on risky investments.
Truth be told, some companies, especially those with cash flow issues, struggle to contribute to the fund. To see their hard-earned cash used in this way must be disturbing.
Little wonder, the Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers (FMM) is calling for "profound structural changes within HRD Corp".
Time is also up for certain attitudes and behaviours at the management level of the public sector. A transformation must happen at a profound level — to borrow a word from FMM. It is clear that lessons are not being learned.
When financial malpractice occurs, at least two people should be in the line of fire. One is the perpetrator and the other is the head of the department. No lesson will be learned if we are slow to punish the two. Waiting for the AG to point out financial mismanagement is a clear signal that oversight, a critical management function, is not being exercised. The AG's regular disclosures of this and that kind of irregularity in government entities are also an indication that there is something not right with internal audit units.
This isn't surprising because internal audit units report to the top officers, some of whom are known to ask for changes to be made to the findings. This is a miscreant's escape route.
Robust audits will only happen if the units are independent of the entity they are auditing. It is also time to end making statements in defence of the entities named in the report. Instead, it is better for these policymakers to get these entities to mend their ways. Statements in defence perpetuate bad governance. And bad governance, as we learn every year, has been very costly to our government coffers.
Those who question the AG's Report must know that there are good reasons why the entities are named in the report. They are certainly not there by some mistake.