Members of Parliament on Public Accounts Committee have queried the qualifications of Lucas Birungi, the Head of Accounts at Mulago Specialised Women and Neonatal Hospital. This is after he failed to interpret the hospital’s financial statements that revealed that he didn’t remit Shs72.915M to the consolidated fund, as part of the revenue collected by the hospital in 2022/23.
This followed a concern raised by Gorreth Namugga, Vice Chairperson PAC, who raised concern about the qualifications of Birungi after MPs discovered that although the Hospital reported to have collected Shs6.99Bn in revenue collected from patients charges, some money worth Shs7.915Mn wasn’t remitted and its whereabouts wasn’t known.
“I am very worried and I want us to interest ourselves in the qualifications of our colleague, the Senior Accountant because it is the Accountant General to come and explain these technical financial statements. I get worried whether it is him that prepared these statements because we are dealing with technical officers. It worries me that the Accountant General comes out to explain something that ought to have been explained by the professional accountant. Do we have the right people for the right position? Because this is why they say Parliament is harsh because of the failure of you and your team to explain some of these areas,” said Namugga.
Trouble started when Muwanga Kivumbi (Butambala County), who also doubles as Chairperson PAC tasked the Hospital administration to explain the low performance in revenue collections, indicating that whereas the Auditor General, John Muwanga indicated that the Hospital had projected to collect Shs9.9Bn in Non-Tax Revenue (NTR), but by the end of the year, Shs6.9Bn was collected.
However, Evelyn Nabunya, Executive Director, Mulago Specialised Women and Neonatal Hospital, clarified that the Hospital wrote to the Ministry of Finance to correct the anomaly in the figures captured from Shs9Bn to Shs7Bn, but the changes weren’t captured.
“We did write to the Secretary to Treasury on our projections of NTR and our projection for 2022/23 was Shs7Bn and not Shs9Bn as shown, so with Shs7Bn projection, we are able to collect Shs6.99Bn which gave us a performance of 99.98%,” explained Nabunya.
When Muwanga scrutunised the Hospital’s financial statements, he revealed that some of the money collected wasn’t remitted to Government as required in the Public Finance Management Act. “You didn’t even transfer the Shs72M to consolidated fund, so the question is, where is the Shs72M. We have resolved that the Shs72M isn’t part of the Shs6.9Bn NTR, it is logical,” he said.
Birungi however insisted that the Shs72M was part of the money remitted and further scrutiny of the documents exposed his lies, which prompted Xavier Kyooma (Ibanda North) to ask the Committee to handover Birungi to Parliament’s Criminal Investigation Department for further questioning, a proposal that was backed by all MPs.
Muwanga while issuing his ruling on having Birungi investigated said, “There is no way, a witness can play a Committee and engage us in this gymnastic, you can’t do that. This gentle man wasted 30 minutes of our precious time that the Shs72.915M is part of the Shs6.9Bn NTR.”
