Government’s promised response to the red flags raised by the Auditor General in his scrutiny of the accounts of ministries and public departments has been as welcome as it is has been intriguing.For most Barbadians, the question remains, what happens now?We are overdue for definitive action on issues of public fiscal management that successive administrations have repeatedly failed to confront.The script has been old and tiresome. Year after year, when the Auditor General report is tabled we express collective shock and outrage at its findings; the blame game between the political parties takes over; no one is held accountable; we mouth support for the Auditor General; then the nine-day wonder passes.We move on until the next report is laid with no fewer alarming findings of glaring deficiencies in financial reporting and record keeping, poor internal controls at state-owned enterprises and reports of failed projects where millions of taxpayer dollars are missing or misspent.The
The $124 million advanced to the Government-owned company to settle a loan guarantee for the Four Seasons project did not go through all the right procedures.That acknowledgment has come from Director of Finance and Economic Affairs Ian Carrington who said proper permission should have been sought via a parliamentary resolution.Issuing Government’s response to the highly publicised and contentious sale of the failed project that resulted in the investment being written off – which was raised as a matter of concern in the Auditor General’s latest report – Carrington agreed that the advance given to Clearwater Bay Ltd, to settle a loan guarantee made in respect of the Four Seasons project, “was not properly appropriated”.He said it had been given based on instructions sent down by the Ministry of Finance at the time to the Treasury.In his report, Auditor General Leigh Trotman pointed out that the advance, made under the previous Democratic Labour Party administration, “was
Auditor General Leigh Trotman says that based on public records, the property housing the abandoned Four Seasons Project has been transferred to a private company but he has seen no evidence of payment related to the transaction. Trotman gave an update on the matter in a follow-up audit in his 2021 annual report, one year after he raised concern about $120 million related to the project being written off in …
The Four Seasons Project - Story of Failure continues to be an example of how the public continues is short changed by public officials elected and recruited to serve us. The inability of taxpayers to solicit answers to legitimate questions regarding the quality of decisions made by successive governments is an embarrassment to the type…