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Govt. to present long overdue 2011, 2012 EPF Reports in March, June
The Government will present to Parliament the overdue annual reports of the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) for 2011 and 2012 within the coming months, Minister of Labour and Labour Relations Gamini Lokuge said.
He said the 2011 report has been submitted to Cabinet and would be presented to Parliament by the end of March, while the 2012 report would be presented before the end of June.
This comes amidst allegations by Opposition parties that Government is deliberately delaying the tabling of the reports in Parliament to hide details of investments made with EPF funds, which stands at close to Rs 1 trillion as of now.
A source at the EPF Secretariat, who wished to remain anonymous, said that the audit reports in connection with the 2012 and 2013 reports are pending, and once they are finalised the reports would be sent for presentation to Parliament.
He said that the 2011 report along with the Auditor General’s (AG) queries, as well as the EPF Secretariat response to those queries, was completed by December and forwarded to the Minister of Labour and Labour Relations. The source said that there had been several audit queries on the Fund’s investments in the Colombo Stock Market (CSE) and the appropriate response had been provided to the AG.
Meanwhile, UNP MP Harsha de Silva charged this week that the Government has not been forthcoming with the annual reports of the EPF, and failed to produce the accounts of the Fund to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of Parliament, despite repeated requests by Opposition members to do so.
The UNP has also alleged in Parliament that the EPF has suffered losses of over Rs 8 billion due to bad investments The AG in his last report submitted to Parliament on the EPF accounts for 2010, noted several accounting deficiencies, and said that the EPF ledger in the Department of Labour had not been properly maintained and a journal to identify the entries in that ledger clearly and in detail, had not been furnished to audit.
The AG said there was a lack of evidence for audit of fixed assets belonging to the EPF to the value of over Rs 600 million, with no proper annual board of survey reports made available, while there was a depreciation of fixed assets belonging to the EPF to the tune of over Rs 120 million during the year under review.