Judiciary clarifies in meeting with FPAC 

Clarifying the matter before the Committee, financial controller, Fatou Jarra Houma, explained that the Judiciary since decentralisation, has been audited every five years by the National Audit Office (NAO).

“The first audit was done in 2008 to 2013, and then from 2014 to 2019 June, including courts of the judiciary and we have reports of all of these with us.”

She also said that they have already audited the previous years without NAO asking for financial statements. “We only do get entrance meetings from them that they were coming to audit from certain periods which is the tail of audit.”

“We thought that the next audit exercise would be by June 2024 of this year, which will be reports from July 2019 to June 2024 with the expectation of an entrance letter from NAO.”

“We deemed it necessary to ask for permission instead of presenting reports of 2016 which has been audited already and included in the report of 2019. We are seeking permission to start it from June 2019 to 31 December 2023.”

“As financial controller, I do report internally to management on our financial activities monthly and quarterly since I was appointed to date.”

Therefore, she said she has all the evidence of what has been allocated to judiciary; how much has been spent; what were the bank balances and reconciled balances.

“I have also written to management as a result of this resolution for other audit heads to provide their operational activities for cooperation of the financial report.”

“As far as allocation, revenue and expenditure are concerned, I have the information readily available to provide.”

However, she revealed that the Judiciary is decentralised from the main operation of the Accountant General. “But we are still not autonomous in our operations,” she clarified. We still do not have Judiciary Service Commission Regulations. We use the PSC Regulations. We don’t have our own pay scale. We use government’s pay scale.”

After an intensive conversation on the extension of the timeline for Judiciary to submit their report to the National Audit Office, the committee has given them until September to submit all requested reports to NAO.