Author: YASINTA AMOS
AfricaPress-Tanzania: COOPERATIVE Audit and Supervision Corporation (Coasco) has said almost 90 per cent audited Savings and Credit Cooperative Societies (Saccos) have been found with unhealthy financial accounts.
It noted that out of 2,227 audited Saccos at the end of June only 227 of them were found with clean accounts. The country has some 6,021 Saccos.
Coasco Acting Director for the Cooperative Audit and Supervision Corporation Zavery Mkingule said most Saccos lacked proper systems of monitoring internal accounts and transactions.
“We have discovered unaccounted payments, ghost transactions and plenty of miscalculations,” Mr Mkingule said at the climax of 11th National Cooperative Week, whose exhibition was held in Arusha.
“But even worse,” the director said, “the management of the cooperative societies seem clueless regarding what was transacted by who and when,” Mr Mkingule added.
The director also said that most Saccos lacked qualified accounting personnel to manage their finances, maintain and compile their reports in a proper auditing language.
Deputy Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture, Prof Siza Tumbo, said he was not intending to interfere with cooperatives’ affairs they had the obligation to safeguard and protect members’ welfare. The deputy PS was the guest of honour at the event.
CRDB Bank Northern Zone Business Manager David Peter said they had been dealing with cooperative societies for over 20 years and were training their members in how to manage their finances.
In the last two decades the lender, one of the largest in the country, had served more than 450 Saccos and so far had loaned 300 of them.
Before the establishment of the Coasco in the early 1980s cooperative societies in the country were audited by the then Audit and Supervision Fund (ASF), a fund that was under the Prime Minister’s Office since 1965.
