Sri Lanka is likely to enter 2026 without an auditor general, as President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has yet to submit a new nomination following the repeated rejection of his previous nominees, highlighting an escalating standoff between the Government and the Constitutional Council (CC).
A CC member said that, as of yesterday (27), no name had been forwarded to the council for the post after it rejected the President’s nominee for the third time.
As a result, the National Audit Office (NAO) has been without an auditor general or acting auditor general since 7 December.
The most recent rejection came on 17 December, when the CC voted down the nomination of O.R. Rajasinghe, the Internal Audit Director of the Sri Lanka Army. At the meeting, chaired by Speaker Jagath Wickramaratne, only four members voted in favour of the nominee, while five voted against. Since then, the President had not proposed another name, the CC member said.
Responding to questions on the delay, Cabinet Spokesperson Nalinda Jayatissa said that some members of the CC responsible for approving the appointment were rejecting the President’s recommendations without providing justifications.
“The country urgently needs an auditor general. That is why the President has proposed the names of qualified individuals and the CC should take a decision on them,” Jayatissa told the media on Tuesday (23). He added that the nominations had been rejected without explanation by certain members, including three representatives of civil society.
Following the retirement of Auditor General W.P.C. Wickramaratne, the President first nominated H.T.P. Chandana, an audit officer at the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation, but the CC rejected the nomination.
As a result, the next senior-most official at the NAO, Dharmapala Gammanpila, was appointed as Acting Auditor General for six months. Subsequently, Senior Deputy Auditor General L.S.I. Jayarathne was nominated to serve in an acting capacity, but her nomination was also rejected.
In total, the President’s recommendations for the post have been rejected three times since the retirement of the last auditor general. The position has remained substantively vacant since April.
Several parties, including the Bar Association of Sri Lanka (BASL) and Committee on Public Finance (COPF) Chair Dr. Harsha de Silva, this week urged the President to appoint an auditor general without further delay to ensure the smooth functioning of the NAO and to restore the integrity of public financial transparency.
They said the prolonged delay had raised serious concerns, as the absence of an auditor general for nearly eight months had disrupted the operations of the NAO, a key independent public sector institution responsible for auditing Government departments, ministries, and public corporations to ensure transparency, efficiency, and accountability in public spending.
Article 153 of the Constitution states that there shall be an auditor general who is a qualified auditor and who shall, subject to the approval of the CC, be appointed by the President.