MPs summon Auditor General over 'compromised' reports

Auditor General Nancy Gathungu before the Senate's CPAC committee on March 4th,2025. (Elvis Ogina, Standard)

A National Assembly committee has summoned Auditor General Nancy Gathungu over claims of "poor quality" reports.

The Public Investment Committee on Education and Governance yesterday alleged that auditors were colluding with State agencies to give their books a clean bill of health.

During a session with the Kenya Space Agency Director General Hilary Kosgei and the Kenya National Qualifications Authority (KNQA) Chief Executive Alice Kande, committee chairperson, Jack Wamboka, accused the officials of exposing flimsy issues while leaving out the critical ones.

"We will want to meet the Auditor General herself because this is unacceptable. The quality of audit that we have now is wanting. We will sit with the office of the Auditor General and have fresh audits for some of these institutions," he said.

"Parliament cannot be used as to rubber stamp the irregularities in government."

The committee claimed that Kenya Space Agency and KNQA had audit questions yet they had been cleared by the Office of the Auditor General.

Wamboka wondered why KNQA had one audit query for the last four financial years and which had been marked as cleared.

According to a report tabled before the House team, one of the issues raised was that 14 members of staff at the Kenya Space Agency had been in acting capacity for over a year while 45 were on short-term contracts.

"The board has regularly renewed the appointments in acting capacity every six months of fourteen management staff pending formal recruitment of the agency's own staff," read the report.

It also cited the agency for lack of an internal audit unit.

At the same time, the report highlighted that KNQA had only two staffing-related issues for the last four financial years. It had also been flagged for failure to surrender excess appropriations in aid.