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President inaugurates conference on auditing |
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September 11, 2000
Dhaka (UNB) - President Justice Shahabuddin Ahmed yesterday said the expectations of common man do not match the ground reality in countries like Bangladesh with faltering democratic traditions. "Our democracy and the democratic institutions, compared with western democracies, are still at nascent stage," he said inaugurating a 3-day international conference on Improving Oversight Functions at a local hotel in the morning. But good thing about this age of information technology is, the President said, nothing can stop flow of information, the consequent mounting expectation and imagination of common man about the role that the State and its institutions should play in a democratic polity. "These expectations, along with a decade of uninterrupted democratic system elevate our hopes that our democracy is deepening its roots," he said. The office of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of Bangladesh hosted the conference on "Improving Oversight Functions: Challenges in the New Millennium" in association with UNDP and the World Bank. Finance Minister Shah AMS Kibria, Public Accounts Committee chairman SM Akram, CAG Syed Yusuf Hossain, World Bank country director Frederick T Temple, UNDP resident representative Jorgen Lissner, Head of DFID in Dhaka Paul Ackroyd and acting regional financial management advisor of World Bank John Anthony Fitzsimon also addressed the function. President Shahabuddin said oversight functions mean watchful care and regulatory supervision of public finance and public expenditure by the parliament, the office of the Comptroller and Auditor General of Bangladesh, and the professional accounting bodies. In functional scenario, a direct correlation emerges: the stronger these overseeing institutions are, the more effective are their oversight functions, he said. "For the relatively new democracies like Bangladesh the improving of oversight functions of the institutions responsible for it, is key to securing good governance and thus improving quality of life of their people." The President said good governance and its twin attributes, accountability and transparency, are new concepts at least in terms of usage in this part of the world. These attributes of a functioning democracy were not properly crystalised in the past, he said. "Consequently, we have not inherited an administrative system with strong oversight functions by responsible institutions either in the discharge of public duties or in its expenditure of funds from the public coffers." President Shahabuddin said compared to the past, where the role of the state was minimal with executive not required to be accountable in the discharge of his duties, the role of the state at present is ever on the increase. "The executive is now more accountable and has to perform its function in a transparent setting," he said. The President said the oversight functions of responsible bodies would have to be improved in the wake of unhindered flow of information through internet, e-commerce, electronic transfer of funds, evasion of taxes from business performing from nowhere, etc. Finance Minister Shah AMS Kibria said the conference is being held when Bangladesh is going through a critical phase of reform in line with the first item of the ruling party's election commitment of transparency and accountability. The present government has made many fundamental changes -- one of those forming the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Accounts, he said. "We are still going through a period of transition and going very vigorously." Kibria said the dream of the country was shattered in 1979 when the military ruled the country. "We have lost more than two decades…we started reforming recently." Although Bangladesh has institutional arrangements for performing oversight functions, they were not yet working effectively or were not yet enforced adequately, said World Bank country director Frederick T Temple. He said Bangladesh Bank is responsible for overseeing the banking sector, but it has not been given authority over the entire banking system. Since the nationalised commercial banks control more than half of total bank deposits and loans, the central bank's effectiveness as a bank supervisor is seriously compromised by the fact that the NCBs are outside its oversight authority, Temple said. He said there are simply too few accounting and auditing professionals in Bangladesh. As of mid-1999, Bangladesh had a total of 1,186 chartered and qualified management accountants, although 203 of them were abroad. This amounts to about 8 per million inhabitants, compared to India's 98 per million and the UK's 4,600 per million. The World Bank country director said: "Bangladesh's education and qualification systems thus need to dramatically increase the production of qualified accountants and auditors." In his keynote address, World Bank regional financial management advisor John Anthony Fitzsimon informed the conference that there are about 40,000 companies in Bangladesh which indicates a need for far more accountants than the 1,200 currently practicing in the country. "That is not even counting the needs in the public sector and in the regulatory agencies," he said. This imbalance has not yet translated into effective demand for various reasons, including negative perceptions about the quality of private sector audits and their independence from management, Fitzsimons added. |