PAC fails to probe any major accounts of 'powerful' ministries

National Assembly's Public Accounts Committee (PAC), the most active parliamentary committee, which has held 44 full committee meetings, failed to probe any major accounts of various 'powerful ministries'.
Despite government backing in Rs 4 billion NLC scam, PAC has decided to wait for the outcome of the inquiry ordered by Chief of the Army Staff General Parvez Kayani instead of giving its own ruling in the light of three inquiry reports pending before it for more than a years.
In the case of allotment of residential plots to Supreme Court judges during the last 14 years, SC Registrar had refused to appear before PAC when summoned. The decisions of Army Chief and Supreme Court have now raised new questions as to PAC's legal status and that of all its decisions during the last seven years; this is particularly relevant in the context that the SC declared PAC's role as recommendatory to the departments without the capacity to implement its decisions.
The Pakistan People's Party government claims that it has upheld one critical clause of the Charter of Democracy: giving the chairpersonship of the PAC to the leader of the opposition in addition to allocation of committee chairs to the opposition. This is unprecedented in our political history but without the power to implement its decisions based on inquiry reports the PAC is an ineffective entity.
Chairman Chaudhry Nisar has repeatedly stated that PAC could only identify the wrongdoings of departments and it was the job of the government to take action against those responsible. But in various scandals, government departments have shown a marked reluctance to fix responsibility and take action against accused.
On many occasions, PAC expressed resentment over the non-co-operation of departments and a letter was written to Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani that secretaries of the departments were not co-operating with the PAC. In response, Prime Minister instructed departments to cooperate with the PAC, but the bureaucracy, by and large, remains reluctant to extend its full co-operation to PAC. Without this critical co-operation PAC has been unable to achieve any success in terms of making departments accountable.
The government maintains that with the chairmanship of PAC with the Opposition it is their responsibility to ensure transparency and good governance through probing the financial affairs of the government and semi-government departments and organisations, detect unauthorised use of public money, misuse of official position, pin point the culprits and recommend action against them.
Compliance of the requirements and mandatory presence of Principal Accounting Officers has not been followed and the PAC meetings are being attended by officers rather than PAOs. The transparency issue came up during a recent visit of European Parliament Delegation to South Asia.
Chaudhry Nisar emphasised that the opposition wanted to work with the government, but was prevented from doing so due to a "total lack of transparency; corruption persists - and this is the single biggest problem the people of Pakistan want to see addressed". On this precise issue, the Speaker had insisted that "we believe in transparency", which was why "the Chairmanship of important Committees, such as the Public Accounts Committee, has been left to the opposition".
The opposition, however, argues that the government is blocking the passage of the accountability bill since, the way it is currently presented, "this would be a recipe for disaster". Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan has stressed that the bill should apply to everybody "including the army" and should be approved in a bipartisan way, and "international legal co-operation on anti-corruption cases" must be facilitated.
The bill is still pending with National Assembly's Standing Committee on Law and Justice. Last two years PAC has held 72 full committee meetings which was registered as highest number of committee meetings but no senior bureaucrat had been held accountable in spite of the revelation of multibillion rupee scams.