The-much talked about national audit report on the suspected embezzlement of public funds between January 1, 2009 and December 31, 2014 is actually incomplete The Daily Times can reveal.
The report, which has been labelled “strictly private and confidential”, is titled “The Auditor General National Audit Office of Malawi – Final analytics report: Reconstruction of the Malawian Government Cashbook for purposes of further investigation- 15 May 2015.”
The 52-paged report which has been done after audit by PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Services (Pty) and is addressed to Stephenson Kamphasa, the Auditor General rightly concedes on page 44 that detection of forcefully deleted transactions and associated users can only be accomplished through a thorough analysis of the server transaction logs (SQL).
“It should be noted that the Server transaction logs do not exist prior to March 2010. Based on such a review being a time consuming exercise, this analysis has not been performed to date,” the reports states.
The report is accompanied by communication from Pricewaterhouse Coopers Advisory Services Director Lionel van Tonder to Kamphasa which states it is the firm’s pleasure in providing to the Auditor General with their final
report regarding the current status of the reconstruction of the Government of Malawi’s Cashbook for purposes of further investigation.
“We confirm that this final report and the findings herein are for the exclusive use of the National Audit Office of Malawi. No other party, whether referred to herein or not, is entitled to rely on any of the findings, views or opinions revealed in this final report without our prior written consent”, says Tonder.
The firm’s director further states that the content of this final report is to be used for information purposes only and may not form the basis of any criminal, civil, disciplinary or any other actions against any party/ies.
“Pricewaterhouse Coopers Advisory Services (Pty) Ltd will not accept any responsibility towards any other party to whom this final report is disclosed or disseminated whether in whole or in part,” says Tonder in his communication.
The report states that with regard to server transaction logs they were set out to attempt to recover one database, for Agriculture and Food Security, with the relevant transaction logs which shows that between 2010 and 2011 some transactions were deleted from the system.
This is the ministry which also shows that it has unexplained transaction totalling K23,284,074,848.83
Overall the report also states that the nature of data provided did not contain elements through which a transaction could be identified as unique in relation to a particular ministry for a particular account.
“Hence, transactional information could not always be accurately mapped to specific ministries and related accounts which may have resulted, in certain instances, in inflated amounts and search results,” states the report.
It also observes that the financial data for the period ending April 2010 was archived as “old data” and stored in databases with the prefix ‘VT’. The data created subsequently to April 2010 is stored in databases with a prefix of ‘BE’.
“A total of 8,165 bank statements were received from the Reserve Bank of Malawi. These statements were consolidated and imported into a database table for comparison against ministry data,” it also observes adding:
“We noted 1,788,295 unique records, with cheque numbers, for the period 1 January 2009 to 31 December 2014. From these 1,788,295 unique records, 174,819 are greater than or equal MK 1 million. As per the request of the AG, the amount of MK 1 million was used as a minimum amount pertaining to our search criteria.”
The report also says a total of 116,252 payments above MK 1 million were identified within the Cashbook, totalling MK 1,128,338,102,110.40 for the period 1 January 2009 to 31 December 2014.
More information on the report will follow in subsequent stories
Leave a Reply