The Mia Mottley administration is being challenged to make legislative amendments to allow an Independent Senator to chair the Public Accounts Committee (PAC).
The recommendation has come from Democratic Labour Party (DLP) President Dr Ronnie Yearwood who also demanded more staff for the Office of the Auditor General and certain constitutional protections for the critical office.
His calls are consistent with requests made by Auditor General Leigh Trotman in the latest and other previous reports.
“The Auditor General has suggested appointing one of the Independent Senators and making a constitutional amendment to do so. At the moment, I see nothing wrong with that suggestion,” Yearwood told Barbados TODAY.
“The same way that this Government can make an amendment for friends and to appoint Senators who didn’t meet a particular threshold to become Senators and for all kinds of other small purposes, you can change the Constitution to do something that actually is meaningful and that is there to protect the interest of Barbadians,” he added.
Trotman’s latest report has unearthed a range of discrepancies and questionable practices in the management of public finances. These include a revelation that the Government had been paying millions of dollars in pensions to people who had died, the transfer of the abandoned Four Seasons Project to a private company, and several state-owned entities that have been failing to produce financial statements for years.
Former Opposition Leader Bishop Joseph Atherley has also expressed concern about the absence of a PAC, which scrutinises government spending, contending that as a result the Auditor General was essentially operating with one hand behind his back.
The DLP president explained that there was significant work to be done to strengthen the Office of the PAC as it is currently “a weak way to address transparency”.
But declaring that it was “better than nothing”, Yearwood blasted what, in his opinion, is an overall lack of urgency on laws and structures that promote transparency.
“It’s not like anybody has to go searching for solutions. The guy has actually told you what he wants. If you read the reports for the last four or five years, he has been calling for more staff every single year. Has he got them? No. But then the government employs a barrage of consultants,” he contended.
“There are constitutional protections for all sorts of offices. Why are you not protecting [the Auditor General] from being sued so that he can do his job freely and without fear or favour? He has recommended that we could get one of the Independent Senators so that the PAC is functioning. Deficient as it may be, it is a part of our setup right now and until we change it, it would be useful to have it functioning.”
The DLP leader pointed to an apparent lack of urgency on other legislation like the Freedom of Information Act and the Integrity in Public Life Bill.
“They can make these things happen, but is it their priority? It obviously is not. They’ve obviously got other priorities and those priorities don’t seem to be the people of Barbados. That is where we are,” Yearwood said.
“We are a party, we are one voice, we can shout as loudly as we want, our supporters and sympathisers are a part of it, but it requires everyone to be honest about where we are and recognise that this is not the Barbados that we want.”
(TD)
