Editorial | Beware: Mongoose at the hen house

As this newspaper has warned before, farmers must be vigilant when they catch mongooses hanging around their fowl coops. If they fail to act they will soon lose fowls, chickens and eggs.

The parliamentary mongooses are again probing the fowl house of the Integrity Commission (IC), with their immediate sights set on one of its fattest and most feisty hens – figuratively, of course – in Pamela Monroe Ellis, the island’s auditor general (AuG). Government legislators want her removed from the IC.

As we reminded several months ago, The Gleaner had early on questioned the wisdom of the auditor general automatic membership on the IC. Our concern was the potential for conflict of interest if a report or investigation by the Office of the Auditor General was the basis of an investigation by the IC, upon which the commissioners had to deliberate. The simple, and obvious, answer, of course, is for the auditor general, in this case, Monroe Ellis, to recuse herself from all deliberations pertinent to that matter.

This newspaper was driven to reconsider its initial position of the auditor general’s membership on the commission when it found itself on the same side of the mongooses circling the hen houses, if the basis of our arguments were different. Everald Warmington, the member of parliament (MP) and a member of the House committee that oversees the IC, raised an arcane constitutional argument of Ms Monroe Ellis being legally responsible for auditing the IC, so she therefore could not be a member of that body. The auditor general’s response was that private, independent firms were used to audit the Integrity Commission.

DEEPER CONTEXT

There is, however, a deeper context to Mr Warmington’s posture on the matter, having, we believe, to do with the IC as an institution and Ms Monroe Ellis the individual.

The Integrity Commission is Jamaica’s premier anti-corruption body, to which key government officials and legislators have to annually file income, assets and liability reports as part of efforts to ensure that they do not use their public offices to illegally enrich themselves. It also monitors the award and execution of government contracts and can initiate the prosecution of public officials who it concludes have breached anti-corruption laws.

Since earlier this year, the IC has faced withering assaults from government members of Parliament, ostensibly because of their upset with how the commission handled investigative reports on people on their side of the aisle. One of these involved Prime Minister Andrew Holness over a claim that several years ago, when he was the education minister, he influenced the award of contracts under the Constituency Development Fund to a friend and business partner.

The commission’s director of investigation referred Mr Holness to its director of prosecution for possible charges for presumed breaching government procurement rules. But within 24 hours of that report being tabled in Parliament, the IC sent to the legislature a ruling by the agency’s prosecutor that she did not have the basis for preferring charges against Mr Holness. Critics of the IC claimed that its handling of the issue was designed to hurt Mr Holness.

UNDER FIRE

More recently, the commission came under fire for failing to resile from its criticism of former National Security Minister Robert Montague for overturning a review tribunal’s upholding of a decision by the Firearms Licensing Authority (FLA) not to award gun permits to a number of persons against whom investigators found “adverse traces”. After a review of evidence, the commission had withdrawn criticism of Peter Bunting, an opposition senator and Mr Montague’s predecessor as security minister.

“The commission has demonstrated a certain bias, a certain unfairness, which demonstrates that this Integrity Commission lacks integrity,” Delroy Chuck, the justice minister, said at the time.

That is part of the backdrop against which Mr Warmington had led the charge for diminishing the power of the IC, including removing its prosecutorial authority and bringing under direction of a parliamentary committee. He also advocated for lifting the immunity for defamation from reports by the commission.

With respect to Ms Monroe Ellis, under whom the Auditor General’s Department has undertaken several aggressive reviews of the performance of government departments and agencies, she, too, has been subjected to attacks from legislators that feel more like attempts to undermine the office than genuine critiques – an observation with which the former Jamaica Labour Party prime minister agrees.

The IC, and by extension Ms Monroe Ellis, has recently been in the firing line again. Last week in the Upper House, the government senator, Sherene Golding Campbell, adopted Mr Warmington’s position that Ms Monroe Ellis’ position on the IC “place(s) her in an unenviable position of conflict with her constitutional and statutory duties” of ensuring that public entities discharge their duties “appropriately, ethically and within the bounds of the law”.

Ms Golding Campbell spoke in the even, measured tones not mastered by the boorish Mr Warmington, but there is no less reason to be suspicious of her motives.