The Leader of the Opposition says that government is not serious about having a functioning office of the Auditor General:

Shyne Barrow, Leader of the Opposition
"So for the last four years, you have been telling us how important the Office of the Auditor General is, and you're trying to find a suitable replacement, but you have done nothing. It is difficult to accept the Prime Minister's presentation that this is not deliberate, Madam Speaker."

"It has been four years, and you may be instinctively tempted to say, well, it's incompetence. I would not say so. I believe it is deliberate, Madam Speaker. If you have a dysfunctional Office of the Auditor General, guess what happens? There's no accountability. There's no accountability for a government that is spending billions and billions of dollars. There is no transparency. There is no good governance. You talk about wanting a suitable candidate, but you're not offering suitable terms. $50,000 to go up against Prime Ministers and government ministers and special interests who are benefiting from the fleecing of the public coffers, not saying, not casting any aspersions to this government, but in general, Madam Speaker, this is a serious position."

"One of the things that the Prime Minister needs to do is to raise the salary. I agree with members of the Public Service Union that $50,000 is a paltry sum for such an important office that is protecting the people from malfeasance."

"We have not had an audit report since 2014, which is absolutely unacceptable, and this government talks about building and expanding on the foundations of the previous government where it was doing good and where maybe it was not performing at the highest level they promised to do far better and to reverse the disastrous course of action and we have not seen that. We have not seen one audit from the office of the auditor general since this government has taken office."

Tracy Panton, Area Rep., Albert
"The fact that there were 49 management reports on record that has not been addressed by the auditor general and a number of financial reports that simply has not been filed. The auditor general, the outgoing auditor general had clearly outlined for the committee what were some of the weaknesses in the system, however, seem to have failed in her attempt to get the support from her staff in terms of addressing some of the low-lying fruits of this oversight mechanism."

Julius Espat, Area Rep., Cayo South
"It is a disservice to the people of Belize that we do not have a functioning opposition and that makes it difficult for us here on the government side, Madam Speaker, because it does not give us an opportunity to proper ventilate the issues."

"And worse, no, when you only have one man, one and a half maybe, that officially represents the opposition in all these committees. So I shouldn't be saying this because I should be happy that there is no opposition, but I'm not speaking for myself. I'm speaking for the people of Cayo South and for the people of Belize to urge the opposition to get their act together so that proper oversight can be done."

John Briceno, Prime Minister
"For too long, we've just been hiring people just to hire people, political patronage. And because of that political patronage, today we're finding these challenges that we don't, for instance, the issue of succession planning. In many instances, we don't have, and I don't mean it as no disrespect to the public service."

"If you look at the public service, it's like a pair, small, highly competent technical people, and then the bottom is a lot of people that we just hired and that, A, they don't have the expertise, and B, we don't give them the proper training to try to make them come up the ranks. Just keep them there, keep them there and hire more people, and everybody will tell you that government have too many workers, but yet everybody ministry will tell you they need more people, and they need more people because of that challenge that we're facing."

"There is no hidden agenda, that's why coming. here, we're following the law. We could have just operate without an auditor general. But we want to follow the law. So we're doing it the proper way, appoint an acting for four months. It will be advertised. There's going to be, I guess that it's your ministry....my ministry will manage the application process. So will ensure that everybody gets involved."

The PM said that the last Auditor General's full compensation package was 120 thousand dollars annually.