Introduction
Section 25 of the Guyana Forestry Commission Act 2007 requires the Commission to submit, no later than six months after the end of the year, a report to the subject Minister (currently of Natural Resources and the Environment) containing an account of its activities in such details as the Minister directs together with a copy of its audited accounts for the year. The Minister is then required to lay these in the National Assembly as soon as possible but not later than eight months after the end of the financial year.
The pre-2007 law did not impose any time within which these two reports were to be tabled in the National Assembly. But surely no matter how grievous the failure to prescribe a date is, it could hardly have been expected that the annual report for 2005 would be tabled until eight years later. But that is just what happened when on November 7, 2013 Mr. Robert Persaud tabled the report and some accounts of the GFC for the eight years 2005-2012 inclusively.
But the late tabling is hardly the only problem in relation to the reports for 2005-2012 to which I will return shortly. The other is that no one seems concerned that there appears to be a black hole when it comes to reports prior to 2005. The official records of documents laid in the National Assembly for the eighteen years from 1996 to 2013 reveal that the first year for which any report or audited financial statements were laid in the National Assembly was in 2013!
What exactly have successive Ministers of Agriculture, including Mr. Robert Persaud, been doing that prevented them from tabling any reports for perhaps as long as two decades? The same question must be asked of the Public Accounts Committee which is responsible for the oversight of not only the government accounts but also “such other accounts laid before the Assembly as the Assembly may refer …”; and of the National Assembly and the shadow minister; and of the Parliamentary Sectoral Committee on Natural Resources chaired by the shadow minister; and of the clearly compromised Audit Office.
Continue reading “Forestry Commission’s Reports – An affront to decency”