DSIP records not kept: Vaki

By LULU MAGINDE
THERE has not been any accountability of public money spent over the last two years because there was no coordination between responsible agencies, an official says.
Department of Implementation and Rural Development (DIRD) secretary Aihi Vaki says since his department stopped disbursing the district service improvement funds (DSIP) in 2020, very little has been made known to him from the Department of Finance on how much was sent to MPs.
“Someone at the Finance Department is not linking up with us or the division responsible is not linking up, though I’ve written letters to the secretary every year asking to provide how much was disbursed every year,” he said.
“So that when we receive the acquittals from the districts or provinces, we will see the records plus the disbursement and see whether there is K2 million or K3 million missing and ask what happened.
“This is to ensure that there’s good governance at the sub-national level as well as in Waigani.”
Vaki explained that because the DSIP programme was continuous, there was no end period when districts and provinces stopped receiving funds.
“What I expect from the provinces and districts is to acquit the year’s expenditure and fiscal projects as well as a financial report and it must come at the first quarter of the following year,” he said.
“But the reality is not like that.
“Sometimes, members link up their acquittals to the next year, making it hard to draw the line of the expenditure from the previous year and the ongoing year.”
Since DSIP disbursement was taken away from the department in 2020 through a National Executive Council decision, transferred the powers to finance, Vaki says there had been no accountability or good governance practices.
“The issue is that we are missing information and so cannot reconcile the figures properly,” he said.
“If I were to manage the funding here, real figures would be released of how much was disbursed and expended.
“The funds must be fairly distributed across the country, we live as Papua New Guineans so we must get the equal disbursement for development.”
Although their functions have been reverted to monitoring and compliance, the difficulty of their job was that disbursement and acquittal reporting may not reconcile.
Vaki said he cannot say for sure how much each MPs received over the course of the five years of the 10th Parliament as some may have received more while others may have received less.