The Mayor and Councillors of the city of Georgetown through the office of newly appointed Town Clerk Royston King will be inviting the Auditor General’s office to conduct an audit into the financial operations of the city.
This is in addition to the recent establishment of an internal audit department headed by Omadele Newton.
King explained to Stabroek News on Tuesday that the audit being conducted by the internal audit department is “about value for money and risk assessment as well as making recommendations so that council can be properly informed when making decisions.”
“Our internal audit department will be used to assess and manage risks and to plot/design systems all to help us to get value for money, we are working hard to have it functioning so that we can account to citizens for the taxes they pay to us”, he said.
Meanwhile the auditor general will be asked to conduct a “comprehensive audit” of the financial management systems of the council. “They will audit to see what are our financial management systems, how effective they are; to see if there have been any breaches and what have been their consequences and what we can do to fill in the gaps” King explained.
This will be the third major examination of the financial operations of the council within the last decade.
In 2008 a commission of inquiry led by economist Keith Burrowes conducted an examination of the financial operation of the entity. Their primary task was looking into irregularities identified in the 2007 Report of the Auditor General on the City; pronouncing on the culpability (if any) of the Town Clerk and the City Treasurer, and making recommendations to the then minister of local government about all of the matters.
The inquiry found that there were widespread financial and procedural irregularities regarding the operations of the Council; it specifically revealed serious breaches of regulations and protocol by the administration of the municipality, particularly within the Treasurer’s Department.
In 2012 Ramon Gaskin was been appointed head of the Implementation Committee for the reform of the municipality and the committee was charged with operationalizing the recommendations of the 2008 Commissioner of Inquiry. That committee found that there was major fraud, including an inflated payroll and payments to front companies at the municipality. Some 50% of the council’s staff were ‘phantoms’ and the City administrators had been conducting business with ‘dummy companies’- companies that have not been listed or registered. In addition to this, some collusion between city staff and persons that are awarded contracts was found.
There have been no reports of substantial changes in the operations of the council since that time. This new probe is expected to specifically focus on the operations of the council under the tenure of recently dismissed town clerk Carol Sooba.
