Manicaland schools face audit

Samuel Kadungure Mutare Bureau
THE Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education will next week start deploying auditors to schools across Manicaland Province to assess adherence to set accounting procedures.

In an interview after conferring John Cowie Primary School of Rusape with the 2016 Secretary’s Merit Award for primary schools recently, Secretary for Primary and Secondary Education Dr Sylvia Utete-Masango said the audits were routine.

“We have schools that were not audited the last time and we are beginning with those. We will then move to schools that were audited during the first round. The deployment will start next week, starting here in Manicaland,” said Dr Utete-Masango.

Dr Utete-Masango said apart from sniffing out rot, the audits will help school authorities to come up with decisions that aid the effective and efficient use of available resources.

She urged parents to speak out each time they suspected foul play at schools.

“Let me make it clear that this is not an investigative audit. We are not witch-hunting, but merely following the law which dictates that every school should be audited annually.

“The only difference is that we are deploying all our personnel to one province and then move to another. The exercise is State-sponsored and will strengthen accounting systems at our schools, even the remotest ones,” said Dr Utete-Masango.

Last year, the nationwide audits unearthed some corruption and embezzlement of funds, with some school heads failing to produce documents to support expenditure while incentives that had banned by Government were still being paid.

Dr Utete-Masango added that auditors will institute special investigations where school heads and School Development Committees are accused of embezzling fees and levies.

Documents that were prepared by the last audit team in Manicaland revealed that some school heads and accounting personnel were ignorant of their responsibility and misappropriated thousands of dollars.