Development funds to move to districts

By ISAAC NICHOLAS

THE National Government under Prime Minister Peter O’Neill will be moving development funds to the districts to cut down the opportunity to ‘abuse’ the system in Waigani, Minister for National Planning and Monitoring Charles Abel said yesterday.
“The National Government is moving away from the policy of parking funds principally in National Planning but other departments as well.
“We are now moving towards moving development funding to the district level, removing people from Waigani guarding pools of funds and using discretionary process to allocate those funds,” Mr Abel said. Minister Abel said the funding to the districts that come out from the Development Budget will be more defined in where the funds are going rather than pooling resources into general areas of agriculture, health, education and coastal vessels programs.
“We will make it more specific as to where these funds are suppose to go and take out the discretionary aspect out of it here at the national level.
“Many of the incidences of corruption have come out simply because officers here and other government departments have too much discretion on these funds. This we will cut off,” he said.
“Another thing is moving away from the principles allocating funding to private organisations and private businesses involved in agriculture activity or other commercial activity,” he added.
“I don’t think government should be in the business of funding the private owned enterprises or activities, I think it is wrong in principle as well, we should be going through agencies like National Development Bank and community based programs.
“We will continue to investigate historically where these things have happened and arrest people,” he said.
He said there are established processes in place under the Public Finance Management Act which provides for mobilisation fees to contractors that are awarded contracts to cover projects.“There are normal government requirements under PFMA, again it is the case of people bypassing established government funding procedures and going outside the system that are corrupting the whole process,” he said.Minister Abel said this yesterday during the signing and exchange of letters between Australia and PNG for ‘zero tolerance’ on corruption and fraud on the Australian aid program to PNG.Mr Abel and AusAid Director General Peter Baxter signed the two counties commitments yesterday in Port Moresby. Mr Baxter said PNG is the second largest program in the world with Australian spending over half a billion in aid program this year alone.He said the program has been here since 2009 with a review to be completed. One of the key planks for the new policy is to crack down on fraud and corruption within the aid program.
“Last year we managed to have a fraud rate which was halved that of the previous year and we did that through a number of mechanisms including posting specifically to our key posts like Port Moresby, to offices who are dedicated to eradicating fraud and corruption, running programs that are more corruption proof with high levels of accountability and this year we will be operating and aligning very much with programs that the PNG government is putting in place.