By Ragan M Conteh

The Public Account Committee (PAC) in parliament has discovered that the Ministry of Environment has not been able to account for imprest of 128,800.

PAC has revealed that if the Ministry of Environment fails to account for such monies in the next hearing the committee will have no option but to order the ministry to refund the money to the Consolidated Revenue fund.

The ministry has also ordered to submit relevant documents that have to do with traveling allowances which the ministry had failed to account for when appeared MPs.

The Audit report has stated that during the period under review, the ministry implemented Phase 2 of the NTPP in which 1,600,000 seedlings were procured and planted by 135 Service

Providers (SP).

Reports from lessons learnt from the implementation of phase 1 of the project pointed that the ministry had decided to change the methodology of using SPs to plant and agreed in a procurement committee meeting held on 9th August 2021 use Community Forest Management Committees (CFMCs) to do the planting.

The report intimated that even though no objection was granted by the National Public Procurement Authority (NPPA), the ministry reverted to using the SPs without authority.

The report further indicated that the audit team selected sampled sites where trees were out-planted by SPs.

A physical verification to obtain information on the SPs’ compliance with the terms of the signed contracts was done too.