Our Parliament is the highest law-making body, well, the only law-making body in the country. The Judiciary interprets and mete out judgements on the law made in Parliament.

Therefore by extension, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) is also of the same stature, meaning a sub-branch of Parliament and should be accorded the same standing.

PAC should have the power to subpoena, ask for documents which must be adhered to and can order the police to search and arrest those who don’t comply.

This is not an alien concept as the American select committees work in this manner.

In one of the highlights in the PAC 1MDB report, it was stated that bank statements to show evidence of foreign bank balance and transaction were not submitted after being requested. This will not be an issue if PAC has the right to issue mandatory orders, a power that High Court judges have. Only then it will be an effective monitoring committee.

The UK experience

In the UK, the Committee of Public Accounts is appointed by the House of Commons to examine: “the accounts showing the appropriation of the sums granted to Parliament to meet the public expenditure, and of such other accounts laid before Parliament as the Committee may think fit” (Standing Order No 148).

This committee scrutinises the value for money - the economy, efficiency and effectiveness - of public spending and generally holds the government and its civil servants to account for the delivery of public services. As delivery models for public services have changed, so the reach of the committee, in following the taxpayer’s pound, has spread beyond government departments to also examine public bodies and private companies providing public service.

To view the sheer number of inquiries their PAC holds in a parliament year refer to here .

There is also a system to their inquiries. PAC oversees the work of the comptroller and auditor-general (C&AG). The committee continues to be assisted by the C&AG who is a permanent witness at its hearings, along with his staff of the National Audit Office, who provide briefings on each report and assist in the preparation of the committee’s own reports.

So the work of the national Audit office and PAC should be in tandem as both are looking after public money. In Malaysia we have both doing their own things and classifying reports of public interest as Official Secrets. The hearings of both PAC and National Audit Office are mostly in public, as it is considered matters of public money are not to be held in secret. I doubt it if any government officers summoned by UK PAC will dare not attend.

Most definitely, no subject of a PAC inquiry will dare denigrate a member of the PAC for fear of sanction from Parliament as opposed to our example in Malaysia.

In the Malaysian case I believe it is more of weak command of English that has prompted the target of the PAC inquiry to blurt out you can’t be 80 percent pregnant .

When the PAC member says he is only 80 percent satisfied but then still signs the report, there is no contradiction. It only means that in his opinion 20 percent stuff or matters are still missing as it cannot be probed to his satisfaction or the report only contains 80 percent of the alleged shenanigans.

By the way, technically you can be 80 percent pregnant, it is the time between you think you are pregnant and you confirm that you are pregnant, but financial and accounting management was quite a tall order at this PAC target so one can’t seriously expect language and technicality to be any better.