By Binta Jaiteh
The National Assembly select Public Enterprise Committee for Gambia Printing Publishing Cooperation has postponed the submission of financial statement and activity report, for the year ended 31st December 2019 meant to be submitted on 26th of February 2021 for final presentation and consideration.
Honorable Halifa Sallah chairman of the committee said there is a constitutional mandate, section (175) of the constitution that makes it mandatory and subsection (4) to establish a committee to monitor the activities of public enterprise with the view to make them accountable to the National Assembly.
“In doing so, the committee is charged with the responsibility of promoting effective, efficiency and transparency of all the undertaking of public enterprise. And to carry out its responsibility subsection (5) makes it mandatory for public enterprise to submit annual report to the National Assembly on their business operation for the preceding year within three months of the end of financial year”
In essence, he said, then all public enterprise before 31st March of each year should submit report on their operation and business on the preceding year. He added
According to him, when we commence work 2017, this committee under the new legislature experience backlog on activity report and financial statement and they take note of section (160) subsection (1c) of the constitution which require the auditor general to include the accounts of the public enterprises in the submission of the annual audit report of the auditor general.
Due to this, they are making sure that they make it a primary objective to put an end to backlog, it was on that basis that we started engaging public enterprises to put an end to this back log.
“We set a deadline that all report dealing with 2019 must be submitted so that we could present a report to the plenary on the two states of public enterprises in the country and move on to deal with current deal.”
In that spirit, he said we started to engage all institutions and firmly inform them that they have to submit a report that is current
He there urged all institution to cooperate and submit their reports.
However, he added that GPPC is a key national printing cooperation, the co-operation is established to print and publish on commercial bases document for or on behalf of the government, public enterprises, distribute and market books and other reading material for schools, institution for higher learning and general public.
Momodou Ceesay, managing director of GPPC informed the committee that the financial statement of year 2019 of GPPA is not yet finalized, it is still with the auditors.
