Region 1 Chairman concerned about procurement breaches

After being flagged for the past three years for audit reports which revealed that Region One (Barima-Waini) has been in breach of laws governing the manner in which monies were spent, along with the awarding of contracts, Region One could be repeating the same mistakes.
According to Region One Regional Chairman Brentnol Ashley, in previous years, a number of projects within that Region had not been managed or monitored properly, and this resulted in overpayments as well as substandard works being done there.
He told this publication in a recent telephone interview that it appears as if this trend will continue for this year’s audit report.
“There may be some breaches of the procurement laws and the financial laws that are governing how monies are spent, how contracts are awarded. We believe that is actually happening here and that is opening up a recipe of corruption for the region. Even to now, the Regional Democratic Council (RDC) is still seeing projects that should have been completed in 2018 still being done in 2019 and not yet finished,” he told this publication.
He explained that some of these projects that rolled over from 2018 are just about 50 per cent completed presently, but they should have been completed since last year.
“We were told at an RDC meeting in October, last year, that there will be no rolled over projects for 2018. There are several rolled over projects across the region which we want to believe that cheques may have been cut for those projects and which is a total breach of the financial regulations Act…in terms of the final payments of projects, I would want to believe that they may have a lot of monies idling there in cut cheques for projects in 2018,” the Regional Chairman stated.
Last year, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) Chairman, Irfaan Ali, had once again called on the Regional Administrations to pay closer attention to matters which lead to overpayment of contracts.
The PAC had expressed disappointment that accounting officers were not adhering to the recommendations by the Committee to address repetitive challenges.
Further, the Committee stated that it believed that the culture where certain officials believe that it is simply acceptable to engage in unbecoming financial practices must come to an end.
At that time, PAC Chairman Ali had said that it was disheartening to examine the Auditor General’s report, which showed the same financial transgressions were being repeated year after year.
To bring an end to this behaviour, he and his fellow committee members put forward a number of recommendations.
Among them, the PAC called for the Finance Secretary to be empowered to surcharge defaulting accounting officers.
It was also suggested that accounting officers and/or engineering staff that knowingly wait until the end of December to sign off on incomplete projects be removed from the system.