The Makueni assembly has recommended that government officials involved in misappropriation of public funds be arrested and prosecuted.
Speaking to journalists outside the assembly chambers, PAC chairman Jonathan Mutua (Kee ward) said: “You see numbers do not lie. We want all those government officials involved in fraudulent deals to steal public money and abuse of office to be prosecuted in accordance with the law.”
According to a report from the Auditor General that was adopted by the assembly on Thursday, there was questionable expenditure by the county government in the 2013-14 financial year, which the Public Accounts Committee could not explain.
In the report, the PAC, which was tasked with investigating the Auditor General’s report for 2013-14, revealed that imprests advanced to top county government officials were not fully accounted for.
The committee established that Sh5.02 million allocated to top executives as imprests could have been misused.
In another case, three companies that were related in ownership, directorship and management were unprocedurally awarded a tender to supply connectivity of structured LAN and WI-FI at the Makueni county headquarters.
According to the audit report, three firms – Open IT Ltd, Blue Two Solution and Integrated Solutions Ltd – bid for several tenders competing against each other. Hence, there was no competition and prices were artificially inflated.
The committee recommended that the county executive recovers all the funds paid to the companies as the value of money was not established.
It also wants the three companies blacklisted for 10 years for malpractice.
The expenditure on bursaries to a tune of Sh11,882,944 was not adequately supported by payment documents, making it difficult for the committee to establish if the bursaries were awarded fairly and to the needy.
A tree-planting scandal that caused jitters in Kivutha Kibwana’s government was also captured in the auditor’s report.
According to the report, Sh47,269,177 spent by the executive in the tree-planting project was being investigated by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission.