REPORT ON THE FINDINGS OF THE DRUG ENFORCEMENT COMMISSION INSTANT SAVINGS ACCOUNT AT MUTABA BRANCH, LUSAKA

Introductions
The Office of the Accountant General is mandated to regulate the operations of Government Bank Accounts through the Public Finance Act of 2004.The Office of Accountant General has therefore put in place several measures which include the supervision of opening Government Bank accounts and monitoring operations of Government bank accounts.

The monitoring of operations of Government bank accounts has been a very big challenge for the Office of the Accountant General as most Ministries and Spending agencies and Banks do not seem to comply with procedures.

You may recall that the Secretary to the Treasury during the workshop for controlling officers did emphases on the need for the institutions to follow the requirement of the Public Finance Act of 2004.
It’s with this background that three officers from the Office of the Accountant General namely:

Ms Nsandi Manza Senior Accountant
Mr. Chibwe Mulonda Accountant
Mr. Evans Banda Assistant Accountant

The three officers undertook an inspection on the operation of the Government Bank account mentioned above and the period reviewed was from 20th September, 2006 to 23rd September, 2007.The following were the findings.

• Account name: Drug Enforcement Commission - Asset Seized Account
• Account type : Instant Savings Account
• Account no. : 9434581
• Signatories : Three namely Mr. R.Chitoba, Mr. L.Saboi and Mr.Koyi
• Mandate : No mandate found on account

• During this period the account had an opening balance of K72,756,763.20 and total inflows of K 132,349,000.00 and total cash withdraws of K190, 421,233.32
• The cashwithdraws on the account had no support documents ready for verifications.


The following is our observations:
• The account is not on OAG database
• The account has no mandate from OAG
• The account is a savings account instead of a current account.
• The number of signatories should be at least be four.
• The panel of signatories should include an accounting officer.

In view of the above it’s therefore recommended that the account be suspended and allow only deposit in this account and a meeting should be held with DEC officers with a view to normalize the operations of this account failure to which the account should be closed.

In conclusion it’s important that DEC should comply with the procedures on the operations of Government Bank accounts and you may be aware that in the recent past Auditor General has raised a lot of querries on the operations of some Government Bank accounts .It’s therefore important that we should put in efforts to reduce on these querries.




Evans Banda
Assistant Accountant

MF/101/9/3

01st August, 2007