Don’t be too quick to scrap EPOC

THE EDITOR, Sir:

Everyone will welcome the setting up of an Independent Financial Commission. This new body, under a knowledgeable, experienced and carefully selected commissioner with a competent staff and the funding required, will be able to come up with more and better data and analysis than can the Economic Programme Oversight Committee (EPOC). Its monitoring of the country’s financial status will be more thorough.

EPOC will then, we are also being told, disappear from the scene. But should not other factors be considered and weighed before dispatching EPOC to a landfill?

In the evaluation of the significance of the data and the analysis and their bearing on policy shaping for the economy overall, EPOC should offer a potentially richer perspective and broader oversight than can a single financial institution, even of experts. It will have the experiences and judgements of the private sector, trade unions and civil society.

Keith Duncan, EPOC’s chairman, can say better than I whether this potential was seriously exploited in the past. But it is or can be there, a cornucopia of valuable insight that no single institution can readily supply.

Should EPOC then disappear or be kept? It seems to me that we ought to stick with it for a while at least. It has served Jamaica well, as have other institutions like the Electoral Commission of Jamaica (most notably under Errol Miller) with a similar kind of membership.

We should not be too quick to scrap it.

HORACE LEVY