Saad Al-Suraihi
Okaz
It seems we have become desensitized to the fact that large sums of public money are being wasted. Projects cost billions of riyals and then the losses cost double that amount, all because of our inability to execute plans with high quality standards. Although it is clear that this is happening, no one seems to care about it anymore. A recent report mentioned that the General Auditing Bureau announced that the sums of SR42 billion and SR980 million were unlawfully spent from public funds during the hijri year of 1435. It is hard to imagine how much money this actually is unless we think of the number of hospitals, schools, roads and bridges that could be built with it.
This type of unlawful spending in a single year could be described as nothing more than financial corruption in many different forms. Some received approval to spend money illegally while others employed a corrupt management system that does not work hard enough to collect public loans. The National Anti-Corruption Commission (Nazaha) must investigate the reasons for the wasted money described in the report. If the Commission does not act fast, then Saudi citizens will have the right to question the role of the Commission.
According to article 16 of the agency’s bylaws, in cases where Nazaha discovers any type of violation, it has the right to investigate the employee in charge, punish him or her administratively and file a public lawsuit against the responsible employee with a third party specialized in disciplinary procedures. If the agency is sincere in its principles of adopting transparency, as it was when it released the information in the report about public spending, will it then implement what this article states and file a public lawsuit to protect the government’s money or will it be lax and fail to do so?
