Editorial | Urgency, MoFPS style

Unless he has left out exculpable details, this newspaper finds implausible Finance Minister Nigel Clarke’s explanation for the collapse of his ministry’s effort to recoup monies from a top civil servant whose action, according to the auditor general, contributed to the government paying millions of dollars to an organisation that had no right to the money.

Dr Clarke’s argument, in a nutshell, is that the education ministry failed to respond in time to requests for information relating to the involvement in the issue of the ministry’s former acting permanent secretary, Grace McLean, causing the three years allowed, between the time of the wonky disbursement and the time of the collection of the surcharge from the offending public official, to elapse. The government had said that Dr McLean was liable to repay J$11.2 million – a claim that her lawyer had rejected.

It is important that two points be clearly established. This newspaper has arrived at no conclusion about Dr McLean’s liability, or if she properly executed her fiduciary obligations. Second, and very importantly, in keeping with the principles of natural justice, she is, or was, entitled to due process.

SEEMING LETHARGY

Our concern is the seeming lethargy with which the finance ministry acted in protecting the interest of taxpayers, although, in the contemplation of officials accustomed to thinking and counting in billions of dollars, the amount in this matter might have seemed minuscule, bordering on infinitesimal.

The case involved a body called Joint Committee for Tertiary Education (JCTE), which started life as an institution of the education ministry but, somewhere along the line inexplicably came under private control and ownership. The committee coordinated the delivery of vocational and skills training, mostly to post-secondary students who did not do well in high school. It was paid millions of dollars for its services, funnelled mostly through the education ministry.

In an October 2021 report, the auditor general blamed Dr McLean and Dean-Roy Bernard, the man she acted for as permanent secretary, for allowing J$124 million to be transferred to the JCTE, although its chairman had taken it private. Dr Bernard, at the time of the report, was in a sort of public-service no man’s land, challenging his removal as permanent secretary in a separate matter that caused the resignation of former Education Minister Ruel Reid and his being subsequently charged for fraud. Bernard recently won a court challenge against his constructive demotion.

ISN’T ENTIRELY CLEAR

It is not entirely clear what action, if any, the finance ministry took against Dr Bernard in the JCTE affair, but he told The Gleaner recently that he never received a letter “requesting a response to surcharge”, therefore there was no need for finance ministry officials to “send me a letter about the statute of limitation”. Any statement made about him to that effect was false, Dr Bernard said.

But, with respect to Dr McLean, the finance ministry confirmed that efforts to enforce the surcharge against her had recently ended, because of the time bar.

According to Dr Clarke, after the auditor general’s report, his ministry wrote to Dr McLean and her replacement at the education ministry, Maureen Dwyer, formally informing them of the report’s findings and asking for their responses. At the same time, Dr Clarke said, the financial secretary “initiated surcharge procedures”.

In November 2021, the finance ministry took legal advice on the matter and appointed an internal committee “to investigate the case”. On December 10, a letter was sent to Permanent Secretary Dwyer instructing her to cease all payments to the JCTE and telling her that the ministry was “performing a review of the recommendations made by the auditor general and required the assistance of the acting permanent secretary for the provision of certain information”.

At a May 5, 2022 meeting of the finance ministry internal committee, Dr Clarke said, it was noted that “no response had been received in relation to previous correspondence to the acting permanent secretary (Ms Dwyer) ”.

The committee agreed that another letter should be sent to Ms Dwyer, reminding of the requests of the previous December. In other words, more than five months elapsed between that first letter and the reminder, during which time Dr Clarke may have somewhere run into his Cabinet colleague, Fayval Williams, the education minister.

The follow-up letter recommended at the May committee meeting was dispatched on, or at least was dated, July 4, 2022. That is a great poster child for urgency.

“To date, the information requested has not been provided,” Dr Clarke said.

Dr Clarke, though, has encouraged taxpayers to take heart in the fact that the Financial Investigations Division and the Major Organised Crime and Anti-Corruption Agency continue to investigate the matter. Should they?