$495M in laptops received under APNU/AFC damaged

…as uncertainty swirls over existence of warranty

With the state being forced to shoulder $495 million in losses due to laptops procured under the former A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC) Government ending up damaged, questions are swirling over what state the items were received in from the supplier, and whether they were even covered by a warranty.

This came up before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on Monday during the statutory meeting. Some 2,959 laptops, costing $495 million, having been received in 2016, ended up damaged.
The then Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Public Telecommunications, Derrick Cummings, explained that the laptops ended up damaged because of the conditions under which they were stored.
When asked whether these laptops were covered by a warranty, and what steps were being taken to recoup the money from the supplier, Huawei, Cummings could not provide any satisfactory answer. And according to PAC Member Ganesh Mahipaul, with so much money involved, the committee needs answers.
“In 2018, the Ministry’s response to this very matter that recurred, the head of Budget Agency acknowledged this finding. So, I don’t know what really is going on, that one year you’re acknowledging the finding, another year you’re saying the problem is with another Ministry. And then you have, in 2017, there is no response from the Ministry.

“It was just documented as a prior year issue not resolved; 2016, it’s the same. So, there is no sequence of this issue and us seeing an attempt to correct what is wrong. And I would not want to say it seems as though we don’t care about Government money,” Mahipaul also said.
Cummings, who became Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Public Telecommunications in 2016, was asked directly what he has done as the accounting officer to address the issue of the damaged laptops. By his own admission, however, he had done nothing.
“I would say to this committee that I did not take any action regarding the damaged laptops, because I think, being a technical aspect of the work of the Ministry under the National Data Management Authority, I was looking to them, or they should have been the persons I was monitoring to ask about it. Based on how you put (the question) to me, I would say I didn’t take any action,” Cummings said.
Ultimately, the Permanent Secretary requested that the PAC summon Permanent Secretary of the Office of the President, Abena Moore, to help provide responses to the unanswered questions that were posed to him.
This suggestion was acknowledged by PAC Chairman Jermaine Figueira, who subsequently directed the Permanent Secretary to provide, by next week, responses to several of the unanswered questions, as well as the contract the Government signed with the supplier of the laptops.

Drama
Drama would soon follow, as PAC Member and Public Works Minister Juan Edghill objected to what he termed as the Chairman’s attempts to impugn the Audit Office’s integrity due to discrepancies with the dates the laptops were received.
For instance, the 2015 Audit Report states that 9,609 laptops were paid for in 2015 and received in April 2016, of which 2,959 were damaged. However, subsequent Audit Reports state that the laptops in question were received in February 2016.
Figueira mandated that Auditor General Deodat Sharma correct this mistake, leading to a heated exchange between Edghill and Figueira. Outside of the chambers, Edghill expressed concern at the direction the PAC seemed to be going, which is to call into question the integrity of the Audit Report, and by extension the Audit Office, which is a constitutional agency.
“If there’s a discrepancy, a typo or mistake or something that needs clarification, the right and proper thing to do is to ask the Auditor General to review and bring clarity on this matter. But an instruction to correct your report I find to be obnoxious, and it was repeated several times,” Edghill said.
“And I’m intelligent enough to know that when that is going to be repeated several times, sooner or later it will be said the Auditor General wrote things that were not factual about the APNU/AFC term in office,” he added.
Meanwhile, Mahipaul also weighed in on the issue and noted that the Auditor General, like everyone else, is subject to human error. According to him, the opposition PAC members’ insistence on having the report corrected should not be viewed as an attack on the Audit Office.
The laptops in question were brought in as part of the One Laptop Per Teacher, which was reformulated from the original One Laptop Per Family (OLPF) project the former People’s Progressive Party Government had started. Head of the National Data Management Authority (NDMA), Francis Simmons has expressed the view that the quality of the laptops was inferior. (G3)