http://www.trinidadexpress.com/commentaries/Building-empty-but-full-of-cash-210916691.htmlWHAT is worse than the Cabinet spending $6.8 million to pull a fire truck 60 feet up a landslide? Paying $26.6 million for a building the Government has never used. And, worse than wasting that $26.6 million, the Ministry of Housing paid out over $850 million in 2012, but failed to provide the Auditor General with the vote books to verify these payments. So, this is not a line-by-line analysis of Government wastage and its consistent failure to account, but a reminder that after 54 years of the Exchequer and Audit Act, we still have major problems.
That $6.8 million wrecking fee is about quarter the $26.6 million the Auditor General says the Ministry of Local Government has paid in rent and security services for a building it has not occupied. Apart from the wasted $26.6 million, here’s the big problem. The Auditor General first disclosed this issue in the report for 2011, and the rent paid at that time was already $17.8 million. And, since that disclosure, the building still remained unused, and a further $9.8 million was wasted.
The truth is in May 2012 neither Parliament and its Public Accounts Committee (PAC), nor the sheer embarrassment of such a shameless act of wastage, was sufficient to compel action by anyone with responsibility to act on behalf of the taxpayer. And, the further truth is that the taxpayer himself was not troubled. In all, $26.6 million flowed into private hands from public monies, with no value to taxpayers, and no one is bothered.
The latest Auditor General’s report, laid recently in Parliament, has the same tone and areas of concern as previous reports. The broad areas of concern remain the failure of permanent secretaries and heads of department to provide responses to the Auditor General as required by law, and the lack of accountability on contract employees.
The other concerns include the failure of certain ministries to provide contract registers and contracts to vouch for and facilitate the verification of billions in expenditure, all pointing to neglect and non-compliance with the Exchequer and Audit Act.
The reality is that this has been going on for decades and senior public servants, including permanent secretaries and other accounting officers, are as complicit as the politicians at whose feet the blame usually rests. By extension, the Public Service Commission and other constitutional bodies charged with oversight are just as responsible for the carnage of accountability and responsibility.
As evidenced by the recent 97th Report of the Salaries Review Commission dealing with compensation for the posts of administrator and clerk within the Tobago House of Assembly, the classification of jobs and level of remuneration in the public service take into account responsibility under the Exchequer and Audit Act. But, once that initial process takes place, no one actually enforces those legal and fiduciary responsibilities.
Ultimately, year after year, the Auditor General finds and reports on an alarming level of neglect, indifference and delinquency.
Even before the overpriced wrecking job highlighted the absence of planning and strategy in respect of Public Service vehicles, the Auditor General raised the red flag on police vehicles. In his March 2010 special report for the period 2006 to 2008 on police vehicles, the Auditor General’s data point to an average annual repair and maintenance cost of $37,000 per vehicle in the Police Service fleet of 1,058.
If we exclude the 497 new vehicles acquired between 2006-2008, for which repairs and maintenance were prepaid as part of the purchases, the average cost for each of the remaining 561 vehicles was $67,000 per vehicle annually. It does not take much to figure out that in the case of older vehicles, replacement instead of costly repairs would make more sense.
In this year’s report, the Auditor General says that 19 permanent secretaries/heads of departments did not respond to the question of payments made from public monies to MPs, excluding salaries and allowances. One non-responder was the Ministry of the Attorney General which means that the Auditor General was unable to audit any payment made by that Ministry to the AG himself, for costs awarded to him before his appointment as AG, and paid to him since then.
And, for reasons unknown, vote books to support expenditure of $857 million were not produced by the Ministry of Housing for audit, and $548 million was recorded as a transfer to UDeCOTT for repayment of a financing facility for the Chancery Lane Complex, but this figure “did not agree with the figure of $3.9 million shown on the Schedule of Accounts, a difference of $544 million.” We may never know if these expenditures were appropriate.
Ultimately, this is not a political party issue. All governments are complicit. And this is not only an issue with elected and politically appointed public officials. It is rooted in the failure of the permanent secretaries, the heads of departments, the accounting officers, and the lawyers and various professional advisers within the State who have fiduciary and legal responsibility to taxpayers.
Some reports of the Auditor General into specific areas of the state are a decade behind, and those which have been laid in Parliament as the law requires have, in the usual course, been referred to either the Public Accounts or Public Accounts (Enterprises) Committees, without further action or interest. Consider the reports dead.
Before us lies a massive failure of decency and the irrepressible march of private gain at public expense, by any means necessary. That $6.8 million wrecking fee was revealed by the media. As taxpayers we should be worried about what remains buried by the avalanche of back-scratching which has caused the ballot box to outpace the Lotto machine in the production of millionaires. You really don’t need a wrecker to get rich. An empty building will get you there faster.
• Clarence Rambharat is a lawyer and a university lecturer
