The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has exposed more rot in Judiciary after the officials failed furnish Parliament with accountability of Shs32bn in 2016/17 and 2017/18 financial years.
MPs ordered the Judiciary to table all reconciled bank statements of all activities undertaken in the 2016/17 and 2017/18 financial years.
Earlier on, the embattled former Secretary to Judiciary, Kagole Kivumbi (pictured) had told lawmakers that most of the money was sent to courts and judges to undertake their judicial work.
However, MPs were left furious when the Judiciary Officials led by the current Secretary to Judiciary, Pius Bigirimana showed up for another meeting without the documents, prompting the Committee to demand for the bank statements to establish the facts around the expenditure.
PAC Chairperson, Nandala Mafabi issued a four-day ultimatum to the Judiciary to produce the bank statements.
“We are giving you up to Friday. We need all the bank statements and reconciliation. What you submitted are some bank statements again with missing reconciliation,” Mafabi said.
Although Bigirimana promised to avail the documents, he declined to take the blame, asking the Committee to summon his predecessor to answer for his sins.
“I want to request that since these people are still alive and they are there, you could invite them here to come and answer those questions. I can’t be responsible for that because I don’t know. What I can do is to get the details from the Chief Registrar of those courts that have not submitted those bank statements and give them a time frame. If they don’t submit them in that time frame I will sanction them,” Bigirimana said.
Speaking to journalists after the meeting, Mafabi explained that the accountability Judiciary’s accounting officer gave to the Committee doesn’t match the figures.
“We have agreed that we summon the former accounting officer to answer for his misdeed of actions. There is a mischarge of Shs34bn. We need bank statements for all courts for 2016/2017 and 2017/2018 because there was a lot of money transferred to all these courts and if the money taken was doing the right thing, our question is, how was reconciliation being done because before you give somebody more money, they should account for the first money. The money we are looking at is about Shs38bn,” Mafabi said.
