MP SPEAKS | The former finance minister Najib Abdul Razak is dishonest for accusing the Pakatan Harapan government of misusing RM42.2 billion as at Dec 31, 2017 when he left us with only RM450 million on 30 April, 2018.

Najib has continued to harp on the Consolidated Fund of the federal government of RM42.2 billion as of Dec 31, 2017 but failed to mention that out of this amount only RM11.86 billion was in the Consolidated Revenue Account.

Payments and transfer of government monies can only be made or used from the Consolidated Revenue Account and only the sum of RM11.86 billion in the Consolidated Revenue Account is actually available for transfer to the GST and Tax Refund Trust Account.

However, this RM11.86 billion available was not transferred to the Tax Refund Trust Account. The total outstanding GST and tax refunds as at May 31, 2018 as announced earlier was RM35.4 billion.

The federal government policy requires all collections received to be kept in a common pool of funds which is known as Consolidated Fund.

However, the amounts kept in the Consolidated Fund actually belongs to three different accounts maintained by the accountant general, that is, Consolidated Revenue Account, Consolidated Loan Account and Consolidated Trust Account.

Najib must understand that only the amount held in the Consolidated Revenue Account can be used for GST and tax refund purposes. When the Harapan government took over the administration of the federal government on May 9, 2018, the latest position in the unaudited Consolidated Fund as of April 30, 2018 was RM35.5 billion and out of this amount, only RM450 million was sitting in the unaudited Consolidated Revenue Account.

In other words, the available balance of RM11.86 billion as of Dec 31, 2017 in the Consolidated Revenue Account has deteriorated to only RM450 million as of April 30, 2018. This shows the Consolidated Revenue Account has deteriorated substantially by RM11.41 billion in just over four months.

Najib should explain this drastic drop of RM11.41 billion or 96 percent in the Consolidated Revenue Account since Dec 31, 2017 to April 30, 2018.

And yet Najib dishonestly accused the Harapan government of misusing RM42.2 billion he claimed that BN left to Harapan on Dec 31, 2017 when he had actually left us with only RM450 million on April 30, 2018.

Despite the tax holiday period which took effect on June 1, 2018, the unaudited Consolidated Fund position of the federal government has improved to RM59.90 billion as of July 31, 2018.

At the same time, the unaudited Consolidated Revenue Account balance has also recorded a higher balance of RM3.81 billion from RM450 million as of April 30, 2018.

This increase in unaudited Consolidated Revenue Account to RM3.81 billion on July 31, 2018 is an improvement of 8.5 times by Harapan as compared to BN as of April 30, 2018.

Hence, it is not true that the Harapan government has misused the Consolidated Fund inherited from the BN government as alleged by Najib.

Sayangi Malaysiaku!

LIM GUAN ENG is finance minister and Bagan MP.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.