The debate over PAC review report on the AAR 2021–2022 was continued at the Joint Sitting.
The House expressed its concern regarding reports of rising unresolved financial irregularities, a high attrition rate, a high level of government debt, unresolved financial irregularities, underutilization of the capital budget, among many other issues, and the need to look into resolving these problems while debating the Committee’s Review Report on Annual Audit Report 2021–22.
The House recommended PAC will receive a status report from RAA by the end of March 2024 regarding the outstanding anomalies of AAR 2021–2022, which will be reviewed and decided upon with the relevant agencies;
The Royal Civil Service Commission (RCSC), the government, and other parties to review the circumstance and take appropriate corrective action to enhance the standard of service delivery and lessen the effects of the rising attrition rate of civil servants.
The Rules for Administrative Disciplinary Actions (RADA) be evaluated by the RCSC in light of the new difficulties encountered during RADA implementation.
The PAC also suggested that the House take into consideration and approve the six RAA recommendations.
The first being the effective Internal control systems must be enforced and implemented throughout the agencies.
Second is that the Ministry of Finance should address the risk of assigning all access rights to a single user in implementing e-PEMS.
Third recommendation looks into the need for greater integration of sectoral master plans with the National Five-Year Plan through robust coordination.
The fourth one is for the government to review the relevance of CSI Bank. Since its creation, the National CSI Development Bank Ltd. (NCSIDBL) has experienced continuous losses and has been mostly dependent on government stock injection.
The fifth recommendation is that the Government should institute a robust credit appraisal system for Financial Service Providers. The non-performing loans (NPLs) of most of the Financial Service Providers (FSPs) had far exceeded the acceptable threshold of 5% set by the Royal Monetary Authority of Bhutan. In some cases, the NPLs were as high as 30%.
The sixth recommendation is to have consistent rules and regulations to regulate entitlements besides enforcing strict implementation.
All six recommendations were deliberated at length and endorsed by the joint sitting.
The Speaker also declared tabling the Performance Audit Report on Preparedness for Cyber Security, and referred the report to PAC for review.