⁠Who Audits the Auditors? Finance Ministry Sets Up In‑House Unit

The Ministry of Finance is quietly building a new internal audit unit, but wait, doesn’t Belize already have the Office of the Auditor General keeping an eye on government spending? It’s a move that immediately draws attention. Why add another layer of oversight inside the ministry itself? And could this new team clash with or duplicate the work of the Auditor General, especially when both are poking into the same financial corners of government? On Tuesday, we put those questions directly to Prime Minister John Briceño to understand what’s really driving this decision, and whether Belize is about to end up with two auditors looking over the same books.

 

Prime Minister John Briceño

“It is because it is a totally different function. First of all, it is something we should have done a long time ago. Any big organization there are auditors and internal auditors. You could check Bowen and Bowen, I was just speaking with the auditor on Saturday night and government should also have an internal auditor. But, the reason why we are doing it now, it should have been done a long time ago, under the IDF funding we are getting from the World Bank, they are making a number of request or requirement for us to access this cheap funding and one of them is to set an office of internal auditor within the government. And the idea behind the internal auditor is they can catch things as they happen, not afterwards. We are hoping they can go into an office and look at the cash books. Why is it that your bank account is not being balanced? This is something you need to do every month. I am finding out in some instances, for years some of these offices are not balancing their accounts.”

 

Prime Minister John Briceño says the Finance Ministry’s new internal audit unit, required by World Bank funding, will catch lapses in real time, and we’ll be watching to see if it delivers cleaner books or dueling audits.

 

Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.

 

Watch the full newscast here: