Certain ministries do not have a warranted accountant monitoring spending, Finance Minister Edward Scicluna has revealed. 

Addressing a press conference about the public contracts review board’s annual report, Scicluna said the ideal was not to have a “centralised big daddy” monitoring spending. 

The Finance Ministry was faced daily with requests for financing approvals that made “absolutely no sense”, Scicluna said. 

“You have to be alert, it is quite important…You cannot have whole ministries without warranted accountants supervising spending”, he said. 

The Finance Minister acknowledged this was a task that needed to be tackled.

Scicluna spoke about the need to have “smart, motivated and upright individuals” who would put their foot down when something was wrong. 

“Transparency is not easy, even when you mean well. It's not always fun, but it is important”, the Finance Minister said. 

Annual reports by the National Audit Office frequently identity the lack of a paper trail justifying the expenditure of public funds. 

An investigation is also under way into whether around €1.2 million spent on boosting Facebook posts over a 55-month period was a misuse of public funds. 

The Finance Minister said before “all these controversies”, the government thought the MFSA and FIAU functioning well. 

“But were they good enough? When you demand a high standard, you realise there are shortcomings. Expert reports are drawn up by those who go into details, they are objective, you have to take notice of them”, Scicluna said. 

On his part, Anthony Cassar, who heads the contracts review board, highlighted how many of the appeals on tenders received last year were from the healthcare sector. 

Cassar said the problem was that those sitting on the adjudicating committees were often not qualified to adjudicate. 

“You cannot expect to have a surgeon or a specialist wasting time on adjudicating tenders”, he said. 

Cassar said through the cooperation of the ministry, steps had been taken to address this issue.