Court of Accounts... Between Violations, Observations, and Negligent Authorities

In Kuwait, we do not suffer from a shortage of oversight bodies, a lack of legislation, or an absence of reports. On the contrary, we have a full army of entities whose supposed mission is to protect public funds, monitor expenditure, and hold delinquents accountable.

Nevertheless, when we open the Court of Accounts’ reports each year, we find almost the same observations: financial violations, weak revenue collection, deficiencies in contract implementation, delays in projects, unpaid due amounts, and funds wasted due to administrative decisions that could have been avoided. Here, we must ask: Where is the real flaw? Has the role of oversight become merely informing us after the damage has occurred that the damage has indeed occurred?

The Court of Accounts performs its role in documenting violations and observations, but the problem begins thereafter. Oversight is not complete simply by writing down an observation and sending it to the government entity, nor does protecting public funds become a reality through the mere exchange of letters and correspondence. What happens in some cases resembles a closed bureaucratic loop: the Court records the observation, the entity responds with an excuse, letters are exchanged, and after a year, we find the same observation back in the report.

Here, the question becomes more acute: Who holds the negligent entity accountable? Who holds the official accountable who caused the loss of public funds through negligence or mismanagement? And why does the state ultimately bear the bill for these errors, while some content themselves with signing a letter, forming a committee, or providing an administrative response?

We have the Court of Accounts, internal oversight bodies, legal authorities, specialized anti-corruption agencies, investigation and follow-up committees. In other words, we indeed possess a complete oversight army. But the citizen does not want to know the number of soldiers in this army; he wants to see their impact. He wants to know how many dinars were saved before being wasted, how many millions were recovered, how many officials were held accountable, and how many contracts were halted before turning into new losses for the public treasury.

The most dangerous problem is not the occurrence of the violation itself, as errors can happen in any administrative body, but rather the transformation of the violation into a recurring state, and some of the Court of Accounts’ observations becoming a fixed annual guest in the reports. When an observation repeats over years, we are no longer facing a transient administrative error, but a flaw in the accountability system itself.

Public funds are not ownerless money, nor are they rigid numbers in the budget. Every dinar wasted is one that could have gone to a hospital, a school, a road, housing, a developmental project, or improving services for citizens. Therefore, leniency toward waste is not merely administrative negligence, but a direct drain on the state’s capacity and the future of its generations.

We need results more than we need more reports. We want every serious observation to turn into a clear path for accountability, and for the citizen to know what happened afterward: Who is responsible? What is the extent of the damage? Was the money recovered? Was the perpetrator referred to investigation? Was the flaw fixed to prevent recurrence?

A state that confines itself to documenting violations without preventing their repetition does not fight waste; it archives it. And if we have all this oversight army, the citizen has the right to ask loudly: Where were you when state funds were drained? And where is accountability when observations transform from exceptions into habits?