| Devastating criticism against Sida administered aid
The Swedish auditor general’s department has criticised many projects in Africa financed with the Swedish tax payer’s money. The department examined fifteen Sida (Swedish international development agency) financed projects in four African countries and found serious breaches in the accounting procedures and the implementation of the projects. Some of the local accounts were audited by well-known auditing companies like KPMG and Price Waterhouse but when these accounts were examined, large sums were found missing. Despite this, the Swedish auditors who examined the local accounts discovered nothing and gave the processes clean bills of health. None of the 15 projects examined escaped criticism.
‘The Swedish auditors did not do enough auditing but merely signed the accounts presented to them,’ says Auditor General, Staffan Ivarsson.
Workers from the audit department went into the field in Namibia, Tanzania, Kenya and South Africa to inspect projects and look at the books. In a project in Namibia, 270,000 kronor was paid to a consultant without any account of what the consultant had done. In another project, a constructor who was to build wells with Sida money built houses with the money instead. No wells were ever found. In other instances faked receipts were discovered as well as unmerited high salaries and registers showing the presence of workers who were never present.
Seka is the unit under Sida which administers projects which are undertaken on behalf of Sida by private organisations. The department has about 6000 projects to deal with annually.
‘It is impossible for us to administer 6000 projects a year which is why we depend on other umbrella organisations’ says Magnus Lindell, head of Seka.
Eva Lithman, chief of Sida’s internal audit unit, says Seka has not been examined in the five years she had been head of the department. She says there are only three of them who work with internal auditing and can only look at the general accounts without going into the details.
The Swedish minister for International Development Aid, Gunilla Carlsson, other politicians and the Swedish public expressed uproar at the news which dominated the headlines and the evening’s news bulletins. The state prosecutor at the state unit for fighting corruption, Christer van der Kwast, has said he will contact the auditor general’s department to examine if there is anything criminal in the report.
Sida gives aid to projects in many parts of Africa with the bulk of the money going to countries in the east and south. Last year (2006) Sida distributed 1.3 billion kronor (about 200 million dollars) of the Swedish taxpayer’s money through private organisations for various development projects around the world. Total Swedish development aid in the same year was 15 billion kronor (about 2.3 billion dollars). 370 private organisations took aid for 6000 projects last year.
Forum Syd is one of the umbrella organisations that administer Sida provided aid money. Forum Syd approves and grants funds to about 400 projects a year. Seven of the 15 projects found wanting in the report received their funds through Forum Syd. Ghana union in Stockholm is a member of Forum Syd but has not received any funding from the organisation. Read Forum Syd’s press release on the auditor general’s report.
The above report is based on Svenska Dagbladet’s report in the print edition of the paper on October 3rd, 2007.
Download the pdf version of Riksrevisionen's 66 page report
More reading
|
