I.— 2

1875. NEW ZEALAND.

PUBLIC ACCOUNTS COMMITTEE. IMMIGEATION INDEMNITY BILL.

Report brought up October, 1875.

OEDER OF EEFEEENCE. (Extract from the Journals of the Souse of Representatives.) Tuesday, the 27th day op July, 1875. Ordered, That the Bill for indemnifying the Colonial Treasurer and all other persons for the expenditure of the sura of £84,040 15s. 6d. for the service of the Financial Year ending the 30th June, 1875, and for charging the same on the accounts of the said year, he referred to the Select Committee on Public Accounts to report thereon.

REPORT. Your Committee, in obedience to the reference to them, have inquired into the circumstances under which the Immigration Indemnity Bill became necessary, and have taken evidence thereon, which they now report to the House. They find that there have been current at one and the same time permanent appropriations and annual votes for immigration services, and that the Treasury and the Audit are not agreed as to what sums were at the disposal of the Minister for expenditure during 1874-75. The Treasury says that the Immigration Minister calculated on the unexpended portions of the appropriations to 30th June, 1874, as being available for the service of 1874-75 (Question 7S), and that, though these had not been made a "reserve" ( 87), they were available after the expiration of the financial year 1873-74 ( 105). The Controller denies this, and would have refused to let the expenditure be charged back if required by the Immigration Minister, because he would have thought the intention of Parliament would have been thereby violated ( 169, W*M*)« -while the Auditor-General considers that there was no reasonable doubt that Parliament intended the money to be spent on Immigration, that it was by a departmental oversight that it was not asked for, and that the money required by the Treasury to fulfil its engagements on immigration might have been issued without calling Parliament together (Minute, p. 21). Your Committee were led by these differences of opinion to investigate the system of reserves, first set on foot by section 3 of " The Public Revenues Act, 1870," which enables each spending department to declare, at the end of the year or period for which an appropriation has been made, the amount to be reserved for estimated liabilities. Your Committee find that neither the Treasury nor the Audit deem themselves to have any duty whatever to ascertain, before carrying the amount of such estimate to credit, whether the same is for liabilities actually incurred or not ( 79, 80, 20°). The Audit ultimately examines whether any sum stated in a voucher as a liability is really a liability within the meaning of the Revenues Act ( 2°7) ; but neither the Treasury nor the Audit have any duty to examine beforehand into even the existence of the liabilities estimated by the spending department, on which estimate the reserve in favour of the department is created ( 29 >200> 201,202). Their only inquiry is whether the reserve is within the amount of the unexpended balance of appropriation ( 20<>). The Audit admits the right of the spending department to create its reserve without question in the first instance ( 203), and has not even the right to question afterwards whether the reserve was properly created, but only whether any particular charge proposed to be put on the reserve was a charge capable of being put upon it ( 2M). To make matters worse, the Audit is of opinion that it is impossible to know what liabilities are really outstanding when the reserve is created ( 201, 21°), and the Treasury thinks the difficulty of determining the meaning of the word " liability " is insuperable ( 86).