Suppliers risk losing Sh6 billion Prisons claims
Suppliers to the Department of Correctional Services will have to wait longer for claims worth Sh6.2 billion to be paid.
The decision was reached on Tuesday after several audits of the department’s pending bills revealed that outstanding claims were irregular or illegal.
Principal Secretary Zeinab Hussein, in a statement, said the Treasury Inter-Agency Pending Bills Closing Committee was scrutinising the claims “with care and due diligence in order to give a final verdict on whether to make the payments or not”.
“The claimants should be patient and await the outcome of the exercise.”
The PS first commissioned a team of 40 auditors from the Treasury to scrutinise all outstanding claims as had been directed by Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i. It took them 60 days to complete the review.
“The findings of Treasury auditors were that all outstanding claims were irregular and some were illegal and, therefore, the team could not recommend payment,” the PS said.
A special forensic audit was then commissioned to authenticate genuine bills to be settled.
The team comprised officials from the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, State Law Office, the Treasury and internal auditors. Their brief was to go through all claims once again and advise on claims to be settled.
The verdict, according to the PS, was that none should be settled.
“However, the team designed a 10-point criteria and advised the State Department to consider settling any claims that met the criteria,” she said.
“Notwithstanding the second set of findings, the State Department set up a committee of internal auditors to verify if any of the outstanding claims met the 10-point criteria. “The committee’s findings were that none of the bills met the criteria and, therefore, recommended that the department could not settle any of the claim.”
She said that some of the suppliers did not attach relevant documents to support their claims, such as quotations, and that some prices for goods and services supplied were exaggerated. According to the statement, in the 2018/2019 financial year, the State Department paid Sh3.7 billion for food and rations and Sh418.9 million for development.
In the current financial year, the department has so far paid Sh2.1 billion for food and rations, Sh64.2 million in pending bills and Sh119.9 million from the Prison Enterprise Fund.
“The department ended the year with no food item related pending bill as contrasted to financial year 2017/2018 that had a bill of Sh1.9 billion,” the statement added.
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