By Muhammad Bah Deputies at the Public Accounts and Public Enterprises Committee (PAC/PEC) of the National Assembly have raised concern on why the Gambia National Lottery officials failed to submit their financialdocument to the Auditors during the Auditing period. This question was raised as a result of a statement made earlier by the Former Accountant that he had submitted copies to the Auditors recently. Members expressed this concern on Tuesday 2 June, 2015 during the third appearance of the Lottery officials to the PAC/PEC Hon. Abdoulie Saine of Banjul Central said according to them (GNL officials), the document got lost when they were relocating from their old office to the new office which happened in 2014 and this Audit was of 2013. Hon. Fabakary T. Jatta of Serrekunda East urged his colleagues not to dwell on that point saying. He added, “we will be very fair as we will listen to you to clear the benefit of the doubt and that we will continue to make our committee recommendations”. Hon. Muhammed Magassy of Basse expressed his disappointment to the officials as professionals entrusted with a public institution working without documents. He said the GNL financial consultant earlier told deputies that he was not issued a contract document and the Accountants and Management all said that they have not seen some of the financial documents during the Audit exercise. Subject Matter specialists Alhajie T.S Njie asked the whereabouts of the Board after all these happenings. Mr. Njie told the management that they are at fault while describing the Board as a failure. A former staff reveals that each day they would collect around D120,000 but the next day there would be nothing to pay to people. He said before he joined the lottery there was not even a Bank Account and he engaged the management to open an account which they did. Current and former GNL officials including the former Mayor of Banjul Samba Faal, Former Chairman, Former Directors and former Accountants were all present to face the queries. However the Audit queries could not be cleared on several points which were noted by the Auditors during their Auditing exercise. The financial documents, including lack of providing documentation to the Auditors was not done. Upon completion of their audit queries, Deputies finally adopted the report after the GNL officials appeared before the committee for the third time. NAMs are finally expected to prepare a recommendation on GNL. ]]>
