The NewGen Party had recently visited the office of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) in Parliament and met the special officer to the PAC chairperson, Nur Jazlan Mohamed. The visit was to learn more of the roles and responsibilities of PAC in the light of several issues being investigated by PAC and the criticism levelled against it by the public.

As a result of the meeting, among others, we learned that PAC has been allocated a very low budget, making it unable to hire staff members and set up a secretariat to perform any duties including investigation works.

As such, currently PAC is handicapped and is unable to perform any investigation which has to be passed on to the auditor-general, and thus PAC cannot conclude any issue until it receives the completed investigation from the auditor-general, which normally takes more than six months.

We feel that this is seriously jeopardising its effectiveness and are baffled that this issue was never raised by any of its members, including from Pakatan Rakyat.

As such, instead of just criticising, we at NewGen Party have decided to offer our assistance to PAC by offering a team of volunteers, free of charge, who are from various backgrounds ie law, audit, banking, government, accounting, etc, to form the secretariat of PAC and to assist in investigating issues being probed by it.

This secretariat will work as part of PAC within its jurisdiction under its chairperson and board. As such, we have written to the PAC chairperson on this humble offer and are awaiting his reply.

S GOBI KRISHNAN is secretary-general, NewGen Party.