Damansara Utama state assemblyperson YB Yeo Bee Yin insisted on access to Permata’s accounts.

I’m not sure whether she was serious to scrutinise Permata’s accounts or she was just looking for faults so that she can claim that Permata’s money has been misused by the prime minister’s wife Rosmah Mansor.

The record of annual allocations and expenditure of Pernata is publicly available if you know where to look.

YB Yeo is trying to portray that government hasn’t been transparent as if Permata’s budget was hidden to the public, despite it can be easily accessed in government websites.

You can access total allocations to Permata in the Estimated Federal Government Expenditure and actual spending by Permata in the federal government’s Financial Statement (audited by the auditor-general):

2012: 2013 Estimated Federal Expenditure (page 110)

2013: Federal Government Financial Statements 2013 (page 68)

2014: Federal Government Financial Statements 2014 (page 69)

2015: Federal Government Financial Statements 2015 (page 82)

2016: 2016 Estimated Federal Expenditure (page 116)

I have compiled the data of annual allocations to Permata (division under the Prime Minister’s Department) and categorised them under their object of expenditure code below:

These are the spending items under expenditure code that are stated above:

10000: Emoluments - Salary, Wages, Allowances, Fixed Benefits for permanent staff

20000: Supply and Service - Utility Bills, Rentals, Maintenance and Small Repairs

30000: Assets - Land and Land Maintenance, Building and Building Maintenance, Facilities

40000: Grants - Scholarships, Grants, Pension, Gratuity

Almost half of Permata’s budget was used to pay for salary of staff under its division under the Expenditure Code: 10000.

There are 585 permanent positions under Permata and RM20,902,600 are allocated to pay for their salary which on average is RM35,730 per annum or RM2,977 per month for every staffer.

Every activity, meeting, operation and intake of children into the Permata programme has been recorded in every Estimated Federal Expenditure document which can be accessed via links above.

There were some baseless allegations against Permata a couple of years back which said that Permata received a budget of hundreds of millions of ringgit every year when the said amount was actually a total allocation for early education for other government ministries and agencies like the Education Ministry, Tabika and Taska Kemas and others.

For instance RM474 million and RM643 million were allocated to Education Ministry for Early Education in 2015 and 2016 respectively.

It’s not true that all funding for early childhood education has been allocated via Permata as alleged by certain quarters.

YB Yeo needs to hire a competent research staff if she couldn’t search government expenditure data by herself.

Every information is at your fingertips.