Editorial
Anti-graft agenda
Effectively put on the back-burner
An audit carried out by the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General brings to light incidence of reckless bribery in foreign-aided projects. Some union parishad chairmen had drawn money without doing any work in development projects being financed by foreign development partners.
The annual audit report, placed in parliament last week, revealed 15 serious irregularities including transfer of money from accounts by project directors with a tell-tale motive of embezzling the funds. There is more to it, ranging from project money spent against fake and tampered memos through unauthorised purchase of vehicles to interest accruals being denied to the government exchequer.
The total money unaccounted for is worth around Tk nine crore. Although this is a small sum compared with the whopping amounts having been defalcated; nonetheless, it's an important pointer to how foreign-aided projects are implemented. Such a string of smaller development projects is vital for the uplift of rural areas.
The ministries do not act on instances of misfeasance detected by the competent authority, so that none is actually held to account for committing bribery.
As a matter of fact, the government hardly ever embarked on an anticorruption drive, far less a serious one. The result is a series of mega-type corruption incidents including Hall Mark, Destiny group and SEC related scams, to only mention the obvious ones. What happened about Padma bridge financing brought bad reputation to the country which was entirely avoidable.
When this government came to power it pledged a vigorous anticorruption drive. It raised public expectations about reduction in corruption. The people thought that with the massive mandate on which the AL was voted to power, government would exercise a strong political will to fight corruption. But what we had depended on to combat graft has turned out to be a propeller of corruption.
Even in this terminal year of this government we would expect it to go all out on the anticorruption agenda to round off its tenure on an optimistic note in terms of establishing a semblance of financial discipline.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments