The Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has warned Zambia’s diplomats serving abroad that it will not tolerate foreign missions being cited in the Auditor General’s report.
Speaking when he called on Zambia’s High Commissioner to Canada, PAC Chairperson Haward Kunda said foreign missions must be accountable and ensure that they are not cited in the Auditor General’s report.
He said PAC will not take it kindly if the High commission is cited in the report of the Auditor General because diplomatic institutions needed to lead by aiming for zero audit queries.
Kunda cautioned the mission to take audit queries seriously.
He explained that for institutions to have clean audits they need to always do the right thing and respond to audit queries on time.
And Kunda who is also Muchinga Member of Parliament said Zambia was on the right path to attain the much needed development.
Speaking in an interview to wind up the Committee’s benchmarking tour, Kunda said Zambia had a similar systems in place like that of Canada, which if let to operate normally, a lot would be achieved.
He said the problem was that the systems which were in place were somewhat being circumvented by unpatriotic Zambians thereby causing the nation to lose huge public resources.
He said all institutions that PAC visited took their work seriously and the systems which were put in place were operating effectively.
The Chairperson noted that the benchmarking tour was very insightful and fruitful in that the Committee was going back home with immense practical lessons learnt which they would put to good use to enhance performance and accountability of public resources in the nation.