NewsWhore
02-04-2008, 04:50 PM
Plagued with doubts and a lack of public confidence, the Chamber of Accounts is languishing in the shadows. With more than RD$675 billion pesos to track and keep accounts on, the Chamber is woefully short of personnel and equipment. They still work the old-fashioned way: with pencil and paper. According to Hoy newspaper, the Chamber of Accounts is historically a "warehouse full of shortened audits, secret audits and biased audits, all because of "technical weakness and political contamination." Their lack of credibility is rooted in the growing perception of corruption or impunity within the public administration and the squandering, the inefficiency and the unscrupulousness in public spending in the face of the agency's inability to produce a transparent audit when confronted with such obvious sudden wealth of questionable origins.
Reporters Minerva Isa and Eladio Pichardo look at the Chamber of Accounts and sum up the organization as "incompetent" to carry out its duties. The report in Hoy says that technology has not arrived at the entity and the RD$45 million that was budgeted for computers and software will not be forthcoming this year. According to Andres Terrero, the head of the Chamber, "we audit entities that are technologically advanced and we operate manually". One of the key issues is money.
The Chamber of Accounts (CC) requested RD$1.1 billion in this year's budget, but it was assigned only RD$423 million, a 10% increase over last year's budget but still short of the RD$792 million it is supposed to receive according to the law. The chief magistrate of the CC told the reporters, "Our auditors are not up to the level that they should have to assure the adequate use of the State's resources. I am not saying all of them, but the great majority did not enter (service) on their professional merits, but rather for political reasons and patronage. One has to pay competitive salaries and our auditors earn miserable salaries."
More... (http://www.dr1.com/index.html#4)
Reporters Minerva Isa and Eladio Pichardo look at the Chamber of Accounts and sum up the organization as "incompetent" to carry out its duties. The report in Hoy says that technology has not arrived at the entity and the RD$45 million that was budgeted for computers and software will not be forthcoming this year. According to Andres Terrero, the head of the Chamber, "we audit entities that are technologically advanced and we operate manually". One of the key issues is money.
The Chamber of Accounts (CC) requested RD$1.1 billion in this year's budget, but it was assigned only RD$423 million, a 10% increase over last year's budget but still short of the RD$792 million it is supposed to receive according to the law. The chief magistrate of the CC told the reporters, "Our auditors are not up to the level that they should have to assure the adequate use of the State's resources. I am not saying all of them, but the great majority did not enter (service) on their professional merits, but rather for political reasons and patronage. One has to pay competitive salaries and our auditors earn miserable salaries."
More... (http://www.dr1.com/index.html#4)