PAC censures municipal agencies for their poor performance

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of the Sindh Assembly has expressed a lack of trust in the working of municipal and local government agencies across Sindh, which despite getting a massive total annual funding of over Rs160 billion have failed to deliver.

The PAC censured the performance of the municipal agencies in Sindh as it met on Monday to scrutinise the financial accounts of the district councils and town committees in Hyderabad Division from the years 2018 to 2020.

PAC Chairman Nisar Ahmed Khuhro, who presided over the session, said that development, which should have taken place in Sindh after providing annual funding of over Rs 160 billion to the municipal agencies was nowhere seen in the province.

He said that if one assumed that up to 50 per cent portion of this massive funding was spent on paying salaries to the municipal staffers then the rest half of this budget of billions of rupees should be spent on carrying out development works.

Khuhro said the PAC wouldn’t tolerate financial irregularities by the provincial government departments in spending public funds. He said the best utilisation of the public money was spending it on the welfare of the people in the province.

He said the PAC would order due punitive action whenever it detected misappropriation in spending public funds at any provincial government department in the province. He said the in-charge officer of a department would be taken to task if they failed to provide audit records of its financial accounts.

Khuhro informed the participants of the meeting that the PAC in the past two months had recovered over Rs90 million from different provincial departments. The PAC directed all the municipal agencies and local government agencies to furnish expenditure details related to funds provided to them by the Sindh government annually.

The committee also directed the local government agencies to maintain budget books for proper recording of the details of their financial accounts and also asked them to constitute proper selection committees to hire employees on a daily wage basis.