Asia News on Aug. 20, 2021

State auditors have identified accounting irregularities and inadequacies totaling billions of pesos in the Department of Agriculture’s (DA) 2020 financial report, which the DA has promised to correct going forward.

According to the Commission on Audit’s (COA) annual audit report on the DA, there were P32.362 billion in accounting errors, including the absence of subsidiary ledgers and insufficient accounting records for 379 accounts, which precluded audit processes from being conducted.

The same report identified accounting errors or omissions totaling P2.087 billion, surpassing the materiality threshold of P360.581 million.

When broken down, the largest percentages of mistakes and omissions occurred in:

unrecorded issuances of inventories worth P942.565 million,

misclassification affecting various asset accounts worth P186.400 million,

purchases recorded as outright expense worth P173.564 million,