By Momodou Jarju
The Public Enterprise Committee of the National Assembly has on Monday adjourned its engagement with the Gambia Groundnut Corporation due to the absence of external auditors.
Muhammed Njie, Managing Director of GGC said they had two engagements as the same day at the national assembly and as a result they could not attend both.
Hon. Halifa Sallah, the chair of PEC, said there was an engagement they had with the management about their commitment to back an end to the backlog before 31 December, 2019 for the 2018 reports so that by 31 March, 2020, they would be looking at 2019 activity report and financial statement.
“Since that has been a difficulty, we have decided that if you submit the two together, this will put an end to the backlog and work on the 2019 and make sure that before 31 August 2020 all institutions submit their 2019 reports. That would put an end to the backlog,” Hon. Sallah said.
The national assembly member for Serrekunda, Hon. Sallah said as long as they are dealing with history, they would not be able to catch up with the challenges they are grappling with and the reason for having audited accounts is to have fair representation of the state of affairs of each institution.
Mr. Njie said they are delighted that they are accorded the opportunity to work on the backlog of the financial statements. He reassured the committee their commitment to ensuring that the backlog saga is addressed. He added that they are going to engage the external auditors to ensure the financial statements are audited.
Njie said for the 2018 to be finalized, it could be in the next two months. He said at least by May, they should be ready to present 2017 and 2018 activity reports and financial statements.
Chair of the committee Hon. Sallah said they have to engage the ministry of finance to ensure the bottleneck is addressed.
Njie added that they would engage the clerk of the committee and board of the corporation to come up with a timeline and report back to the committee.
