By Zephania Ubwani
Arusha.Government operations are being gravely impacted by the shortage of internal auditors,it was revealed here on Monday.
The central government and its autonomous agencies-the local governments and parastatals -need at least 948 auditors to fill the gap.
The situation is more critical in the local governments where there are only two auditors per council compared to five in the ministries.
"There is a mismatch between the existing number of auditors and the huge demand", warned the Internal Auditor General Athumani Mbuttuka.
According to him, for the government to deliver it must have a minimum of 2,409 internal auditors for its ministries, local governments and parastatals.
"As of today, we have 1,461 internal auditors, meaning there is a shortage of 948 personnel, equivalent to 39 percent.
Mr. Mbuttuka was speaking here at the start of a conference for internal auditors from public institutions at the Arusha International Conference Centre (AICC).
Besides the shortage of the critical human resource, the internal audit units in government departments and parastatals were poorly funded.
Low budgetary allocation has led to poor working tools and failure to send the skeleton staff for refresher courses to upgrade their skills.
"Urgent measures have to be taken to address this", he said at a meeting organized by the ministry of Finance and Planning.
Mr. Mbuttuka warned that the sector can be left behind by digitalization given the apparent shortage of state-of-art ICT gadgets.
A recent survey of all segments of internal auditing country-wide has only 32 IT auditors, six engineers, three medical doctors, eight procurement experts and only three quantity surveyors.
He suggested a comprehensive review of the scheme of service for the internal auditors cadre that would ensure fair renumerations for them.
The task has to involve the professional bodies such as the National Board of Accountants and Auditors (NBAAA) and the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA), among others.
He said due to poor auditing has led to losses to the government in tenders and settling payments to the suppliers in time.
He called on the government to ensure that each large project should have a budget to cater specifically for auditing work.
This, he said, would ensure "real-time audit" for which the sixth phase government has argued for action on it.
Opening the meeting,the minister for Finance and Planning Mwigulu Nchemba acknowledged the challenges facing the cadre.
However, he called on the financial auditors to do relevant examinations so as "to remain professionally relevant and internal audit works to be of more value".
These include examinations on Certified Information and Systems Auditors (Cisa), targeting the electronic audit systems.
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