Parliament’s Committee on Public Enterprises (COPE) is moving to restructure internal audit and financial oversight across Sri Lanka’s 457 state-owned enterprises, with Chairman Dr. Nishantha Samaraweera saying “urgent intervention” was needed to fix “disorganised conditions” in the sector.

Samaraweera was addressing a UNDP-sponsored workshop for nearly 300 Chief Financial Officers and Internal Audit Officers drawn from across the SOE sector, held at the Monarch Imperial Hotel in Sri Jayawardenepura on Saturday. He said officials entrusted with public funds were expected to maintain a high level of performance and accountability, and that a strong internal audit mechanism was vital for the wellbeing of state enterprises.

With 457 SOEs in operation, Samaraweera said it was impractical for COPE to summon every institution before the committee. Steps were therefore being taken to introduce a digital monitoring mechanism to evaluate SOE performance, he said. Workshop participants also proposed strengthening the independence of Internal Audit Officers by making them directly accountable to Ministry Secretaries rather than to the heads of the institutions they audit — a structural change intended to remove the conflict of interest under which auditors currently report to the entities they are auditing.

Auditor General Samudika Jayaratne, who attended the event, said public funds belonged to the people and must be managed transparently. The Department of Management Audit’s Director General A.P. Kurumbalapitiya delivered a lecture on internal audit’s role in public accountability, while former Auditor General Sarath Mayadunne — currently an advisor to COPE and the Committee on Public Accounts — spoke on SOEs within Sri Lanka’s accountability framework.

The Saturday workshop followed an earlier session held for SOE heads and forms part of a broader post-crisis reform of state enterprise financial management. The push comes against the backdrop of COPE’s earlier audit of the coal import irregularities, the ongoing NDB fraud accountability thread involving parliamentary committee oversight, and the state of emergency extension debate over fuel-supply governance.

Source: The Island.