Africa-Press – Uganda. Parliament has directed that a fresh audit be conducted on the financial records of the National Water and Sewerage Corporation (NSWC) to unearth the suspected rot that could have been hidden mid-last year when the Auditor General failed to access the entity’s statement.
This is part of the report’s resolutions distilled from a litany of engagements the Committee on Commissions, Statutory Authorities and State Enterprises (COSASE) had with NWSC last April over the queries raised in the findings of the Auditor General for Financial Year 2021/2022.
It was discovered that in April last year, two staff at the NWSC masterminded an attack on the ICT system and consequently wiped financial records of at least two months held on 17 servers. This was within a period when Auditor General Mr John Muwanga was auditing NWSC.
Committee chairperson Mr Joel Ssenyonyi who presented the report in a plenary sitting that ended just minutes before 8PM on Thursday evening believes that this was an intentional move.
“Their financial systems were hacked and wiped out. We understand it was an inside job because it happened during the audit period. The records were not in place so they could not be audited. It was as if somebody was trying to hide something,” he said.
Mr Ssenyonyi added: “The Information Technology Equipment for NWSC was hacked into leading to the interruption of the corporation’s work, and loss of data which was needed at the time of the audit. The accounting officer should provide the recovered data to the Auditor General for audit in the next audit year.”
How it happened
The evidence furnished to COSASE showed that on August 18 last year, the management of the NWSC learnt that its ICT servers had been hacked into thereby allowing third unauthorized parties to gain access to the financial as well as other critical systems. This was allegedly executed by two workers at the entity whose actions targeted 17 servers and later asked that they be given a whooping USD289,000 (about Shs1 billion) for every server to be restored.
Their actions caused a wipeout of all the financial records and yet the company had allegedly never installed any backup of the same anywhere.
“The Accounting Officer submitted that on August 19, there was a ransomware attack on the servers of NWSC which encrypted nearly all the systems, preventing them from working. He said the data had been backed up but this did not include the last two months of the financial year,” the report reads in part.
It adds: “The data was reconstructed because the systems were internally created, but what was recovered was not exactly what was there before, and there was a need for reconciliation. Some IT systems were completely destroyed and the automatic relay system of billing was temporarily removed.”
One of the two culprits was interdicted while the other was simply transferred to another department within NWSC. But the NSWC insisted that punitive action had been implemented on the two staff that were found liable for the incident.
Other findings
It was also discovered that the NWSC owes its creditors Shs184 billion. The COSASE report shows that “the accounting officer submitted that Shs18 Billion (10 per cent) of the debts were within a credit period of 60 days while those amounting to Shs166bn were for over 60 days. The credit period of NWSC is 6O days.”
The committee also revealed that it had “received complaints from staff of NWSC who were disgruntled about their pay. They say the pay they get is not commensurate to the work they do,”
In defence however, the corporation NWSC acknowledged that it “had received similar complaints from their staff and that management was in the process of revising the salary scale of all their staff members in consultation with the board.”
“The Committee was further informed that the money owed to the corporation grew by Shs39 billion in FY 2022123 and that the bulk of this was by MDAs (Shs23bn).”
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