GRANTS for small and medium enterprise (SME) development programmes should be monitored in terms of expenditure performance by the three ministries involved to ensure compliance with financial regulations, the Auditor-General’s Report 2021 said.

It said the monitoring should be carried out by the Entrepreneur Development and Cooperatives Ministry, Economy Ministry and the Finance Ministry.

According to the report, this is to ensure that the grants given to the agencies involved are fully utilised for the intended purposes.

“If the grants are not fully spent, the remaining amounts must be returned immediately so that it can be used for other development programmes,” it said.

The report added that the Malaysian Small and Medium Enterprises Corporation (SME Corp) should plan carefully and take into account all the needs of SMEs before applying for funds to run the programmes.

According to the report, auditing had been carried out for the development grants under the SME Investment Partner (SIP) programme and the Going Export (GoEx) programme from 2014 to 2022 involving a review of RM59.52 million.

The objective of the audit, it said, was to determine whether the grants were spent for approved purposes in accordance with the laws, guidelines, financial regulations and agreements in force.

The report said that RM16.73 million from the SIP programme had not been spent, while the poor implementation of the programme resulted in only RM27.91 million of the RM59.52 million in grants being spent within the set period while RM14.88 million was spent on other programmes, making the total amount spent for the benefit of SMEs being RM42.79 million or 71.9% of the allocation. – Bernama, October 10, 2023.