The Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) has stated that Auditor General (AG) Deodat Sharma was “not factual” when he stated that $1.550 million requested from the Contingencies Fund had been used to pay a non-taxable bonus to employees of the Government Information Agency (GINA).
In the 2015 Auditor General’s report laid in Parliament last week, Sharma stated that the OPM had requested “an advance of $11 million from the Contingencies Fund on 29 December 2015, for payment to GINA to offset partial liabilities to the Guyana National Newspapers Limited (GNNL), [publisher of the Guyana Chronicle newspaper].”
The report further stated, “An audit examination of the requisite payment vouchers and other supporting documents revealed that GINA paid GNNL the sum of $9.450 million, whilst the difference of $1.550 million was paid to GINA employees as a non-taxable bonus for the year 2015. The AG concludes that the advance was therefore not used solely for the purpose intended.”
In a statement issued yesterday, OPM challenged this conclusion stating that a total payment of $15,720,588 made to GNNL on January 8, 2016 on invoices for the period July to August 2014 included the full amount of $11 million received by GINA from government and therefore was fully used for the purposes intended.
Efforts made by Stabroek News to contact Sharma last week proved futile, as when contacted his office said that he was unavailable.
According to the OPM statement, the new government inherited a GINA debt to GNNL incurred by the previous PPP government of $74,091,147, which had accumulated between June 2014 and May 2015. Just prior to general elections, from January to May 2015, the previous administration had spent $26,282,740 on advertising in the Guyana Chronicle, OPM said.
GINA had no resources to meet that debt, thus the GNNL Board of Directors raised the matter with the Office of the Prime Minister and the referenced advance was sought.
The amount of $11 million was received by GINA and accounted for via receipts #1003 and #1004 issued to the Office of the Prime Minister on January 7, 2016. In addition to the $11 million, $4,720,588 was paid on the debt from GINA’s budget with the full payment being formally acknowledged by GNNL via receipt #229916.
OPM has also clarified a second observation of the AG who reported that a $13.8 million procurement of a new Toyota Land Cruiser Station Wagon GX was problematic.
Sharma stated that under the OPM’s Capital Expenditure, a sum of $19.405 million was used to purchase a $5.3 million Toyota Corolla car, a motorcycle at a cost of $203,000 and a Toyota Land Cruiser valued at $13.8 million. However, while OPM had received the car and motorcycle in 2015, the Land Cruiser was not delivered until September 2016 several months after the full amount had been paid to the supplier on 4 January 2016.
This was despite the terms recorded in the quotation stipulating that 50% of the price must be paid on “firm order” and the remainder on delivery.
In the AG’s report OPM responded to this observation stating that systems had been implemented to avoid recurrence. Yester-day’s statement further explained that OPM had been advised by the supplier that a fire at one of Toyota’s factories in Japan, caused a significant delay in the delivery of the vehicle.
