The audit findings and the inaction

Jun 02, 2016 Editorial, Features / Columnists

There have been a lot of revelations coming from the audits ordered by the Granger administration. These audits were forced by the many reports of corrupt transactions during the tenure of the Jagdeo and Ramotar administrations.
The public sat and hoped for anything that would put the corrupt persons behind bars. Indeed, in the run-up to the elections, the politicians challenging for political power had the mantra, “We will jail them.”
It was some months before the first audits were made public and indeed a lot of irregularities were uncovered. Large chunks of money seemed to have been moved around without the requisite authority; semi-autonomous agencies made loans to other agencies in much the same way commercial banks did.
The auditors failed to find a paper trail in many cases. Contractors were fingered. Many were overpaid or were paid for work that they did not execute. But for all this, there have been no attempts —or so it seems— to have people prosecuted. In fact, the general populace is now saying that it is giving up hope of seeing anyone prosecuted.
President David Granger, when asked about the findings of the audits, said that they would have uncovered facts, and that the police must now do their work. We are not sure that the police have the capability to cope with white collar crime. There is a legal advisor who is knowledgeable about the law, but we are not clear whether she has seen many of the audits.
The audits uncovered evidence of over-pricing, yet there seems no way for the government to recover its money. One of the hotbeds of corruption seemed to be the programme that would have seen 90,000 households being provided with laptops over three years. It turns out that thousands of the laptops were stolen and thousands more were defective, suggesting that the supplier provided defective equipment.
Why has no one been asked to provide explanations for the irregularities? We are aware that one of the first things that the previous administration did was accuse the present government of witch-hunting and being ever so conscious of accusations, the government may be reluctant to act, even in the face of the most dastardly crime, once it seems to have been committed by people associated with the previous government.
This could only be seen as a case of trying to tolerate wrongdoing. The government is probably more aware of the fact that it came to office on the slimmest of majorities, and it therefore wants to safeguard that majority and at the same time, take measures that would win over opposition supporters.
What it does not know is that given the political history of this country, there is unlikely to be any significant shift in voting trends. The result is that a government must do what it knows is right and let the chips fall where they may.
And while the government is trying to avoid ruffling the opposition feathers, the very opposition is doing all it could to demean the government. There is constant reference to the campaign promises, one of which is the reduction of the value added tax. It matters not that while it was in government, the opposition had also promised that reduction. Three years later, when Donald Ramotar was ousted, there was no move in this direction.
At present we are seeing some responses to the findings in the audits from people who claim to be maligned. They have also accused the auditors of being unprofessional for releasing the findings to the media. There is the insistence that the audits have failed to find corrupt transactions, a conclusion that we do not support.
Given the expenditure, we would expect to see some serious movement to correct the anomalies that have surfaced. We also expect to see people made to repay monies that they wrongly ordered to be spent. The audits have exposed a lot and we want to see something for the money spent to have them conducted.

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The audit findings and the inaction

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