– Persaud
The Office of the Auditor General will soon complete its examination with regard to an alleged fraud at City Hall and six persons have had their leave extended to facilitate the investigations by the unit and the police.
Minister of Local Government, Ganga Persaud, told the media during a briefing at his office in Kingston yesterday that while the investigation appears lengthy, the Audit Office is set to conclude its examination of the finances of City Hall in another 9 days.
He said the police are also working around the clock to conclude their investigation and are cooperating with the Audit Office. He said too that there are several “complexities” involved, which may prove a tiresome task for the investigators.
Persaud elaborated that the “complexities” surround the management of financial records at City Hall. He said there were problems with access to information, proper documentation and information as regards the movement of records. There is also the issue of accessing information of persons who work /worked at City Hall as well as approval of overtime. Apparently, there is no readily available paper trail on finances.
In July, the police were called in to carry out a criminal investigation of City Hall’s operations, after an initial investigation suggested major fraud including an inflated payroll and payments to ‘front’ companies.
The involvement of the Guyana Police Force was revealed at an emergency statutory meeting of the council where discussions centred around whether three senior city officers would have been sent on leave to facilitate an internal investigation.
Mayor Hamilton Green had previously told this newspaper that he had written to Persaud and indicated that he welcomed an in-house investigation. He had also requested that Town Clerk Yonette Pluck-Cort, City Treasurer Andrew Meredith and City Engineer Gregory Erskine be sent on leave to facilitate the investigation once there was agreement on it. Green wrote a follow-up letter after no response was received but again, the council said it got no feedback. The council then proposed to have the officers proceed on their annual leave.
Meantime, the completion date for a Human Resource (HR) audit which is being undertaken by the Local Government Ministry at the regional administration departments across the country has been pushed back by a month in order to facilitate a thorough analysis of existing HR records in the regions.
Persaud was critical of the regional offices’ level of record keeping, calling it “damning in some instances” and noting that it led to more thorough investigations.
“What we are doing is that we are trying to reconcile face with names on payrolls,” he said.
The audit is aimed at ensuring proper record keeping relevant to persons in the employ of the government at the regional level across the country. “You see the audit in itself cuts across all employees: education …cleaners, drivers, nurses and because of how the hinterland regions and sub-regions are configured… movement and configuration play a role in terms of the speed (of the investigations)”, Persaud stated.
Yesterday, Persaud stated that the Region 10 administration was the only one where the audit has suffered delays and this he attributed to the disturbances which impacted the process. He said the ministry’s work programmes had also been affected. After the protest, a number of contractors withdrew from the area and gave back the work to the regional administration; a move which he noted put the ministry in a “bad state” with regard to completing its work programmes by December 31.
He elaborated too that there are aspects of the government’s work programme in Regions 8 and 9 as well as Region 7 to a lesser extent that are currently experiencing problems since a considerable amount of time elapsed while the vehicles were blocked from passing through Linden. He said the disturbances affected the transport of materials and machinery into those areas to carry out capital works.
