Who is audited by the AG’s office? Depending on the flavor of the week in the social media, different public entities are named. Recently, this has included Petronas, Jakim, Permata, PMO, MACC, PDRM and so on. If you are looking for a single entity, you can try your luck by searching the AG’s office website. However, for management purposes, as required by those in the administration, civil societies, and research, we need to look at the audited entities more broadly and from different perspectives, e.g.
- National level
- Federal level
- State level
- Departmental level and
- Organizational level.
We may also want to know how many audits have been undertaken with any of the public entities and be able to access the audit reports and summaries directly. This exercise can be a daunting task if you are working with the original reports from the AG’s office, but the task is made easy with the Malaysia Auditor-General’s Report Information Graph. The objective of Information Graph is to address this type of issues and more by making the audit reports more accessible, integrated and usable.
Technical Notes:
- At the time of writing (January 2016), we only have the annual AG’s reports for years 2011, 2012 and 2013 included in the system.
- If you click on the image in this blog, an enlarged image will be displayed in a separate tab page. You can zoom into this image.
- The Captions at the bottom of the images include a link to the live system. The display of lists in the live system may be trimmed if you are not a subscriber.
- The count-bubble in teal indicates how many associated audits the entity has.
- More annual reports are planned to be added now that we have the beta version in place.
- This system is still in beta, so errors and omissions are expected. Do provide feedback.
National Level
At the National level, the users may want an overview of all public entities audited by the AG’s office. The screen below shows the 1300+ entities currently available in the system. They are displayed in pages of 250 each.
The annual national development budget of about RM50 billion is expended through projects. This figure does not include states’ development budgets. The screen below provides an overview of the 400+ projects implemented in the country with the number of related audits. Most of the projects have been audited only once. Those with numerous audits include:
Federal Level
The options available to view to audit entities at the Federal level is shown on the next screen.
The next screen shows the list of Federal Departments and the count of the related audits. JKR and Customs have attracted a lot of attention from the AG’s office with 26 and 14 audits each over the three years.
The next screen shows the list of Federal Ministries grouped to the ministries.
State-Level
The State-Level options may be of special interests to state administrators and members of the state legislative assemblies. The users can focus on one state or compare similar entities of different states.
State Government of Sarawak
The next screen, shows the public entities under the state government annotated with the number of related audits. The entities with multiple audits include:
- JKR Sarawak [10]
- Jabatan Pertanian Sarawak [4]
- Jabatan Tanah dan Survei Sarawak [8]
- Jabatan Ketua Menteri Sarawak (JKM) [3], and
- Jabatan Hutan Sarawak [3]
Organization Level
To improve the governance of an organization, we need to look at the information at the organizational level. JKR Sarawak is a good example to demonstrate the audit reports related to an organization.
JKR Sarawak has three national projects and six state projects. As shown in the screen below, there are ten related audits on these projects with another one on the activity of JKR Sarawak.
Sample Audit Information
The next screen shows a sample audit information page. There are three tab pages for the three related documents – Audit Report, Intisari Laporan, and the Audit Summary. The “Filed under” panel shows the headings that the audit has been filed under.
Summary
The voluminous AG’s Annual Reports can be unraveled and made more transparent when the individual audits are decomposed and organized in an information graph. With our system, the users can browse for information from many perspectives, and this provides the advantage of been able to see related information at the same time. This process will only get more meaningful as we process and add more of the AG’s annual reports.
Malaysia AG's Report Information Graph 
Indeed it is a tedious task for the layman to “unravel” these voluminous reports, many of which are in jargons not easily understood. When these facts are scattered it is a daunting task to try to link them together to provide a more meaningful perspective. Indeed the initiative for provide such system will aid us in having a better understanding of the whole picture. Thanks.
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