The Mayor and City Council of Georgetown is ready to facilitate any forensic audit and the Office of the Auditor General is welcome anytime, according to new Mayor Patricia Chase Green.
“I have no objections. The Council is there, anyone can ask for an audit. The Auditor General is free to come in at anytime to do any audit. My surprise is that now there is a big call because there is a new council in and a new Town Clerk, for an audit, but I will have no objection,” Chase-Green was quoted as saying yesterday in a Government Information Agency (GINA) report.
Newly-elected PPP/C Councillor Bishram Kuppen, in a letter to the press this week, urged that a forensic audit of the municipality be considered among the items for the new council’s first statutory meeting, scheduled for next Monday.
The GINA report said Chase-Green also noted that between 2011 and 2012, the former city council wrote the Auditor General on three occasions to conduct an audit but no intervention was undertaken.
Further, she recalled that two previous audits done by Keith Burrowes and Ramon Gaskin were undertaken at the council’s behest.
“Anyone who wants to come in and do an audit, they are free to do so. The law provides for that, so my hands are clean, I have no problem with that… but the persons who were calling for an audit, I don’t think they would want to spend the money for it. But if they are willing to spend the money, I have no problem with that,” she reiterated.
In addition, Deputy Mayor Sherod Duncan told GINA that the new councillors must know the financial status of the council in order to design and implement projects. He said that City Hall in the past had been perceived as corrupt.
“We ought to lay those perceptions to rest. These new councillors coming in have a right to know what is the health of the city council, not only financially, but in other areas- what is the health of the other departments of the council, we need to know what we are taking over because that is the chief basis on which we are going to lay our plans and in order for those plans to be successful we have to know what is the health of the council,” Duncan stated.
