adminConstituency Development Fund (CDF) due to a shortage of manpower and money.
The ministry has only six auditors to do the job.
Acting Constitutional and Parliamentary Affairs permanent secretary, Mrs Virginia Mabiza, on Monday said the ministry would not be able to audit all the 210 constituencies before year-end.
Mrs Mabiza said this on the sidelines of a capacity building workshop for 20 parliamentarians organised by her ministry in Masvingo.
She said they would cover only 87 constituencies by the end of August.
“We have started auditing the use of funds allocated to legislators by the government under the Constituency Development Fund, but we are facing a serious shortage of auditors in our ministry to complete the task on time.
“We hope that by the end of next month we would have audited at least 87 constituencies but we do not think we will be able to finish all the constituencies before the end of the financial year in December unless we can have more auditors,” said Mrs Mabiza.
She said her ministry had since appealed to other Government departments for auditors to beef up their staff.
Mrs Mabiza said the fate of legislators who would have abused the CDF was not yet to be disclosed adding that was the role of the Finance Ministry.
“Our duty as a ministry is to simply carry out the auditing of funds and we will write our own recommendations, but we do not know what will happen to those legislators who abused the fund.”
She said legislators were supposed to send returns to her ministry detailing how they used the US$50 000 allocated to them.
She said next year legislators would be getting US$60 000 under the fund.
This allocation will only be availed to those who have submitted returns on their expenditure.
Online Reporter