A mal­ware at­tack has de­layed au­dits in­to the fi­nan­cial state­ments of Na­tion­al Quar­ries Com­pa­ny.

It was re­vealed be­fore a Pub­lic Ac­counts (En­ter­pris­es) Com­mit­tee on Wednes­day, that the Min­istry of Fi­nance had on­ly re­ceived au­dit­ed fi­nan­cial state­ments from the state en­ter­prise up to 2020.

Act­ing CEO Ger­ard Mathu­ra ex­plained the com­pa­ny’s 2021 au­dit had just been com­plet­ed and the re­main­ing de­layed sub­mis­sions were due to a cy­ber­at­tack.

“The rea­son why 2021 took such a long time, and why 2022 is tak­ing some time, and al­so 2023 will take much longer than nor­mal, is be­cause of that cy­ber­at­tack which led to the loss of our ac­count­ing soft­ware,” said Mathu­ra.

He ex­plained fur­ther, “Right now, in or­der to pre­pare au­dit sched­ules, you have to use all the source doc­u­ments. You don’t have the soft­ware be­ing to build your sched­ules, etc. So it takes a long time now. It’s a man­u­al process to de­vel­op those au­dit sched­ules for the au­di­tor. In ad­di­tion to which, when the au­di­tor now is re­view­ing those sched­ules, he or she can­not go to the soft­ware to do his in­ter­ro­ga­tion. He now has to re­sort to ver­i­fi­ca­tion and val­i­da­tion through the source doc­u­ments.

Mathu­ra how­ev­er was less clear in his ex­pla­na­tion of the com­pa­ny’s cur­rent pric­ing struc­ture, as he ex­plained the com­pa­ny was very cau­tious as it was in a high­ly com­pet­i­tive mar­ket.

He said, “We would have done a mar­ket sort of analy­sis in terms of the pric­ing, the cur­rent pric­ing, and where that is, is that there was one prod­uct that our price was slight­ly low­er than the mar­ket price. So we felt that there is a room for move­ment there, and a board no­tice cur­rent­ly be­ing pre­pared for the next board meet­ing to have that price change up­ward so that we will be in line with the mar­ket. Be­cause cur­rent­ly, the mar­ket is very soft, be­cause con­struc­tion is sort of down. So there’s high lev­el of com­pe­ti­tion in the mar­ket, we have to be very mind­ful if we raise our price any too high, we will lose the cus­tomers that we cur­rent­ly have be­cause it’s very com­pet­i­tive.”

How­ev­er com­mit­tee mem­ber, In­de­pen­dent Fran­cis Lewis felt this re­sponse did not clar­i­fy pre­vi­ous com­ments that the cur­rent pric­ing struc­ture which had seen the com­pa­ny sell ag­gre­gate well be­low the cost of pro­duc­tion.

Mathu­ra said the com­pa­ny was in the process of ad­just­ing pric­ing, pend­ing board ap­proval, in re­sponse to the queries on the mat­ter.

—Pe­ter Christo­pher