A team from Office of Federal General Auditors, Addis Ababa, which had been auditing AMU’s financial records for 2017-18, in their exit conference held at President’s Office on 18th December, 2018, discussed financial cross-cutting issues like expenditure, asset management, purchase & procurement, receivables & payables, vehicle maintenance, etc. in the presence of AMU top officials.
Federal General Auditors Audit Manager, Mr Girma Belachew, heading team, said, this year, AMU has performed quite well and while examining, evaluating, checking and scrutinizing financial records within the parameters of rules and regulations, we identified risks and suggested solutions. You know higher education institution has responsibilities like feeding students, wherein if they go by the book things often become dilatory. He adds therefore, there should be some relaxation in rules to carry out those tasks, but it’s government who will take the call in dealing with such quirky situation.
AMU President, Dr Damtew Darza, reacting on the occasion, said, the team was here for over 5 months auditing AMU records and today we have discussed issues and respective individuals have forwarded their comments to the team.
He further adds, the team was here for 3 months to examine 3rd quarters’ activities and again this year for two months to complete auditing. And we tried to engage internal auditors to carry out audit activities continuously; in this regard, we made lot of improvement. The challenges pertaining to meet urgent needs for teaching-learning for which materials are procured through a centralized procedure that prevents corruption was also discussed. We are happy with the report and whatever comments provided to us will be implemented
Academic Affairs Vice President, Dr Yechale Kebede, said, the team informed how things were done and we put forth our evidences to substantiate arguments. Primarily academic issues like expatriate staff taxation and local staff salary issue, came up for discussion; they asked us to recover tax backlog as we had started deducting expat staff salary tax quite late. But, we informed them that expat senior staff members are leaving university for huge chunk of salary (35%) is deducted, which is adversely affecting teaching-learning process in the university.
He further said, they also asked us to reduce salary by half of those local staff members gone abroad to upgrade education; however, we said that their salary being meager it’s not possible as it will demoralize them in the long run.
Administrative Vice President, Dr Melkamu Mada, said, today we focused on procurement process, expat staff salary issues and to serve over 20,000 regular students we need adequate staff, while we have been expanding entire infrastructure but volume of staff remains the same for rules doesn’t allow daily workers to be appointed on regular basis; we reasoned that it needs structural change.
This year, we performed much better, he said, and for unutilized budget, AMU wasn’t at fault but stated budget allocation wasn’t released from the Ministry of Finance. We also deliberated on different methods exercised for procuring materials, he added.
Apart from Girma Belachew, auditing team has had three auditors, Mr Mengistu Mamo, Mr Tokuma Chala and Daniel Jalota, who had deep interaction with AMU top officials including officials from Finance and Audit and Inspection Directorates.
(Corporate Communication Directorate)