COPENHAGEN, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- The Danish National Audit Office's (Rigsrevisionen) concern of a possible accounting fraud at the Nordic Council of Ministers has led to both the council appointing an auditing firm to review documents and Denmark withholding further contributions to it.
"We will withhold part of our contributions until the external document review is complete and we are confident that no irregularities have occurred," Mogens Jensen, minister for food, fisheries, equal opportunities and Nordic cooperation, told the Danish political website Altinget.dk on Wednesday
Denmark is withholding 30 million Danish krone (4.48 million U.S. dollars) out of a total of 80 million Danish krone, which should have been allocated to the Nordic Council of Ministers on Jan. 1, 2020.
Mary Gestrin, head of communications at the Nordic Council and the Nordic Council of Ministers, has suggested the problem may be caused by a flawed accounting program.
"The National Audit Office was concerned about some details in the annual report for 2018. Therefore, an external audit has now been carried out to confirm that the National Audit Office's concern has not been justified," said Gestrin.
So far, 91 percent of 13,700 documents for the period from Jan. 1, 2018, to Apr. 30, 2019, have been reviewed, which "have not revealed anything worrying," according to Gestrin.
