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How to cut out Treasury sloppy errors

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The National Treasury building in Nairobi. PHOTO | SALATON NJAU | NMG

An article in this paper this week blew the whistle on a huge error the writer of the story discovered in a key government document, namely The First Quarterly Economic and Budgetary Review. That document reported a non-existent loan of Sh8.6 billion recorded as owed by Kenya to the United Kingdom.

And how did the Treasury explain away this blatant error? We were told to treat it as a mere ‘typo’. What sent tongues wagging was the alacrity with which the Treasury moved to pull down the document from its website. This is not the first time we are seeing this level of sloppiness in the reporting of data and in compilation of budget documents by the Treasury.

While I was business editor of the Daily Nation many years ago, we would — as part of preparations for covering the Budget Speech — make several copies for the previous year and distribute them to reporters on the Business Desk all in readiness for coverage of the new one.

It was our way of putting reporters into the rhythm and language of budget speeches to prepare them to be able to quickly tease out fresh and newsworthy parts of the new one.

Just before the speech was read, we would converge at the editorial conference room to follow the live transmission.

On June 14, 2002, all reporters on the Business Desk sat around the conference table, ready to follow the live transmission of the Budget Speech by then Finance minister Chris Obure.

As we sat there listening to the minister, one hawk-eyed reporter rose to alert us that the minister was actually reading from the Budget Speech of 2001 and parroting what had been read the previous year, word for word.

It was a gotcha moment for all of us. We all grabbed our photocopies of the 2001 Budget Speech to see whether what the young hawk-eyed reporter was saying was the truth.

We discovered that the minister had engaged in a shameless cut-and-paste job, lifting chunks of the previous year’s Budget Speech and reading it as if it was fresh.

Hours later, we sent a reporter to confront the minister and ask him why he had lifted and read whole paragraphs from the previous speech in such a blatant manner.

We wanted to make the point to him that the sloppiness he had displayed had cast doubts on the credibility of the document he had just presented before the National Assembly.

Mr Obure had been caught pants down reading this important document before checking it for accuracy. The minister put on a brave face trying to explain the mistake away on the grounds that the parts he had lifted from the Budget Speech of the previous year was background information and therefore still relevant to the one he had just delivered.

In 2009, there was a public uproar when it emerged that the supplementary estimates had contained blatant errors.

But if there is a lesson to be learnt from this latest ‘typo’, it is that these errors — especially when it comes to reporting and recording national debt data — will persist as long as national debt numbers are still maintained on mere excel sheets.

These typos can never happen in a corporate environment especially where data on debt are maintained on double-entry and accruals accounting regimes.

Indeed, the elephant in the room here is the accounting crisis at the heart of the public finance management and reluctance by successive administrations to tackle accounting reform and to transit to a double-entry and accruals accounting environment.

This week’s story also reported that the Office of the Auditor-General has launched a comprehensive assessment of Kenya’s public debt for accuracy. The problem, however, is that we don’t have creditors’ ledgers that are maintained on a double-entry, accrual system.

The best the Auditor-General can do is match source documents of debt against excel sheets.

Under the circumstances, you cannot pick out unrecorded hidden debts as happened in the Tuna scandal in Mozambique.