Staff members at the Ministry of Education under the leadership of Prof George Magoha are on the spot again over the expenditure of Ksh85 billion in the 2020/21 financial year.
Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu issued a report which showed that MoE staff failed to follow the stipulated procedures and the precision, exposing gaps in how billions of public money was spent.
The auditor revealed that her staff were denied access to the National Education Management Information System (Nemis) while many school principals failed to concede whether they received funds allotted to schools.
Further, she reported that there were also questionable school bank accounts and shoddy bookkeeping.
Gathungu stated that their failure to access Nemis made it impossible for auditors to verify and validate expenditures totalling Ksh59.5 billion.
This is in contravention of Section 9(e)(i) of the Public Audit Act, 2015 which grants the Auditor-General unrestricted access to “all books, records, returns, reports, electronic or otherwise and other documents”.
One of the questionable outcomes was that auditors could not ascertain the number of students per school and county “at any time of disbursement”.
“None of the listed schools raised an acknowledgement receipt in the system. Further, the disbursement schedule included payments amounting to Sh137,084,111 made to 225 secondary
schools whose bank account number format differed significantly from the format of bank accounts for banks supported by the national banking system,” the report indicated.
“It was therefore not possible to confirm whether the school’s bank account numbers were correctly captured and the concerned schools received the funds.”
The government disbursed Ksh8,284,401 to schools that had the same bank account numbers.
“Even though the names and sub-counts of the institutions were different indicating an error in the fund’s transmission.
The anomaly was not explained and no evidence of refunds was provided to indicate the correction of the error,” the report stated.
There were falsehoods in the ministry records as 1,933 secondary schools had been documented as having the same Teachers Service Commission identification numbers.
These same schools have different names and are in different sub-counties and in total these schools received Ksh834,403,799.
Prof Magoha has also been on the spot after it emerged that his ministry gobbled up to Ksh10 million in allowances on inspection of desks in schools across the country.