• Pending bills are still undergoing further vetting in counties.
• Governors have also disclosed different figures which some county chiefs disputing the amounts disclosed by the auditor and CoB.
Image: FILE
County suppliers and contractors owed billions of shillings will wait longer for their monies after two independent institutions failed to ascertain the correct amounts owed.
Auditor General Edward Ouko and Controller of Budget Agnes Odhiambo yesterday said that further vetting of the pending bills was still being conducted in the counties to ascertain the exact figures.
"Pending bills committees have been formed in counties to verify the bills after an audit found that some of them were fake," Ouko said.
Odhiambo and Ouko appeared before the Senate County Public Accounts and Investment Committee to explain the conflicting pending bills figures that the two officers have been releasing.
According to the CoB, counties owe suppliers and contractors Sh108.4 billion but after the auditor perused through the documents presented for audit, only Sh51.2 billion were found were eligible leaving a difference of Sh37.7 billion.
Governors have also disclosed different figures which some county chiefs disputing the amounts disclosed by the auditor and CoB.
Yesterday, Ouko and Odhiambo blamed the counties for the pending bills puzzle.
“My office and that of the Auditor General are not contradicting each other. What we give in our reports are the figures that were disclosed by the counties themselves,” Odhiambo said.
Odhiambo said that the issue of pending bills has been of great concern after the figures shot from Sh37 billion in 2014-15 to Sh108 billion in 2017-18.
She said that the underperformance of own revenue, late disbursement of funds from the Treasury and delays in approval of the supplementary budgets by the MCAs are major factors contributing to the ballooning debts in the counties.
Ouko, on his part, told the committee that the scope of its work in the special audit of counties' pending bills was to verify the eligibility of the authentic bills.
“My role was to verify the figures presented by the counties. We recruited CPA firms who carried out the verification exercise so any county disputing the figures should explain because the auditor does not originate the figures,” Ouko said.
Some county bosses who appeared before the committee to respond to audit queries disowned the special audit report on counties' pending bills saying that they were not involved in the process.
Tharaka Nithi Governor Muthomi Njuki said that he had not seen the special audit of the pending bills of the counties.
Njuki told the senators that although his administration commissioned an audit of the pending bills largely from the previous regime, the report of the special audit was not shared.
“I am seeing this report of the special audit for the first time. We commissioned a committee to audit all the pending bills from the previous government which was at Sh1.1 billion when I assumed office,” Njuki said.
Hard-pressed to explain the difference between the figures released by the CoB and the OAG, Ouko said that the CPA firms commissioned for the exercise verified the figures as presented to them by county treasuries.
“We wrote to counties to provide us with the list of pending bills and it’s on the basis of the list provided that the verification was carried out,” Ouko said.
(edited by O. Owino)