By Ahmed M. Gedi (sanjab)

In normal circumstances, your MANDATE should have been Independent from the Executive Branch and should have been accountable to the House of Parliament, as the Chief Advisor of the legislative body and thus being able to draw your annual program of the Work without the interference of the Executive Body, which you are expected to audit all their annual activities to be carried out as outlined in the budget, which have to be approved by Parliament. Although the independence of your office is much to be desired and the resources made available to you is insufficient in consideration to the poor maintenance of accounting books by the Ministry of Finance and their deliberate reluctance to account fully all public MONIES and lack of maintaining government accounts properly as required by the rules and procedures applicable, which in my view is sufficient to ensure an EFFECTIVE check on the assessment, collection and proper allocation of revenue.

Yet I do believe your office could have saved millions of $ by simply engaging whistle-blowers like Legislators, civil society, C.I.D,, investigative journalists, website editors and honest citizens who can provide pertinent information on how public monies are embezzled, siphoned, evaded, misappropriated, wasted because they honest citizens who care about the development of their country.

It is also a fact that our Auditors are poorly paid , since their take home salary can only meet 15 days of his/her family maintenance and it will be unavoidable to assume that the temptation of soliciting bribes and other corruptive mechanisms will adversely affect their honest performance in general. Those of us who were in this field for a considerable time should convince our Legislators to review the salaries of the Somaliland civil servants and in particular those whose integrity is not in doubt.

I am very pleased to learn that the Auditor General, finally made a very promising statement that testifies that all the Central Bank foreign currency transactions and the bank accounts books of the Accountant General Department have been reconciled as at 31/12/2005 and therefore the Auditor General certify that no monies in foreign currency (ices) was missing to the government. It is a regular practice that bank reconciliation statements are prepared periodically between the ACCOUNTANT GENERAL’S BOOKS and the Books of the Central Bank. It means, a final bank reconciliation statement was drawn as at 31/12/2002--31/12/2005 and such a reconciliation shows an audited bank balances from the commencement of government accounts of Mr. Dahir Rayale Kahin at the time of resuming the responsibilities Of the Chief Executive of the government as per the article of the Auditor published on website…………………I do not understand the nature of the question Mr. Ahmed is responding to is not understood and I would like to encourage him in providing further clarification for the common good of all parties concerned.

According to reliable information I gathered in 2002, revenues collected in foreign currency like export of livestock was deposited directly to a $ bank account, in which the signatories were the President and the Governor of the Bank. Neither the Minister of Finance nor the Accountant General had an access to that account and Sos/Shs AAFO account for Burao reconstruction. There may have been some more $ and sos/shs accounts, which were operated similar to those mentioned. Since the Accountant General was not informed about the transactions of these two accounts, how can the Auditor General be in a position of being able into preparing a bank reconciliation statement to these accounts when the Accountant General did not have an access to bank books of these accounts? From the annual Budget of 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 $ revenue proceeds from POL excise tax from M/S Total Red Sea Ltd and $ collected from Somaliland-Diaspora and foreign passport holders, there are also gains on currency exchange transacted by the Central Bank as main Treasurer of the government.

The Bank owns foreign currency exchange shops in Hargeisa and probably in other main cities too. Unless there is lack of internal control mechanism between government accounting transactions and counter transaction of the Bank, I believe it is normal practice that the Governor of the bank submits periodic bank reconciliation statements on all government accounts, such statements are initially reviewed by Accountant General and finally audited by the Auditor General’s Office. In that statement, the governor should furnish the following information:-

An audited bank statement of this nature should be made available to the parliament periodically. For my own curiosity how frequent does the audit office reconcile bank statement of main CASH offices like Berbera Customs, Kalabaidh customs, Hargeisa airport etc…etc?

I am also aware of the fact that hundreds of thousands of $ is taken by government officials every year for travel missions to abroad. From reliable sources such sub-impress has never been retired and do not show in the accounting books held by the Accountant General, since the $ revenue from which advances were made from was not originally accounted in the books of the government. I do recall that our bank was trying to open foreign currency accounts in Ethiopia with Central Bank and also with the Commercial Bank. I hope those trials and similar ones in other countries were successful and have opened several foreign currency accounts in different countries...

As a result of these facts and probably the existence of many government bank accounts not yet reconciled , although such accounts were made operational long time ago. On the basis of these findings, I am requesting you to re-evaluate your article, which was published on ……………dated…………or provide more explanatory note that can convince us that the books were effectively reconciled by your office.

Mr. Ahmed M. Gedi (sanjab)

Chief Executive,

Institute of Public Integrity &

Anti-corruption...

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