Jagdeo doubles down on Goolsarran’s lack of integrity

– Says he was handpicked by coalition gov’t to do forensic audits in breach of Audit Act.

Several sections of the Audit Act and other pieces of legislation were breached in the hiring of former Auditor General Anand Goolsarran as a forensic auditor during the APNU+AFC’s tenure in government.

This was revealed by General Secretary of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) Dr Bharrat Jagdeo during his weekly press conference on Thursday, as he doubled down on the former AG’s lack of integrity.

Goolsarran, who has been threatening to sue Dr Jagdeo for his statements about his “lack of integrity”, attempted to rebuff Dr Jagdeo’s comments in a letter to the editor.

The General Secretary, however, poured cold water on Goolsarran’s assertions, which included that he did not find his statement about reducing procurement fraud in the APNU+AFC’s manifesto.

“He claimed that I am basically lying, that that’s not in the APNU manifesto for 2015…I have the manifesto here, page 46 of the manifesto, this is it,” as he showed reporters in the room the manifesto document he was reading from.

Further, pointing to Section 4 (2) and (3) of the Audit Act of 2004, which speaks to the government’s power to conduct an additional audit providing that an agreement with the important stakeholders is made, Dr Jagdeo highlighted that Goolsarran’s appointment as a special auditor was not done in accordance with the law.

“Mr Goolsarran in 2015 was handpicked by APNU to do forensic audits. He should know the law well…to know that the Minister of Finance could not contract him directly to do any audit, that it was illegal to do so when he took the job as a forensic auditor for the government,” he explained.

“If it didn’t go through the Auditor General, and it did not go through the Auditor General, it had to go through the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament and that never happened,” Dr Jagdeo further stated.

Last week, the General Secretary staunchly defended his earlier assertion that the former Auditor General lacked integrity.

Jagdeo highlighted his tenure as Deputy Auditor General under the PNC in the 1980s. During this period, Goolsarran was responsible for assisting in the drafting of audit reports for the central government accounts.

However, there were no such reports during Goolsarran’s tenure, raising questions about the proper utilisation of public funds allocated to the Auditor General’s office.