Editorial | Don’t enable Warmington

It was disappointing that Nigel Clarke left unchallenged, and to an extent facilitated, Everald Warmington’s false insinuation that the Integrity Commission (IC) hasn’t produced annual financial accounts, or that these statements haven’t been tabled in Parliament.

Our concern over Dr Clarke’s lapse, unwitting we hope, hangs on two pegs.

Firstly, Dr Clarke, the finance minister, ought to have been aware of the facts. It is he – or it is done in his name – who signs off on the Integrity Commission’s ability to engage independent auditors to review its accounts, as required by legislation. The auditor general, Pamela Monroe Ellis, can’t carry out that function, because she is a member of the commission. That would be a conflict of interest.

The larger point, however, is Dr Clarke’s well-known, and hard-earned, reputation for good governance, marked by his efforts to establish and, or strengthen institutions that limit the ability of public officials to operate on whim and, thereby, in their personal interest. Which contrasts with efforts over the past two years by some parliamentarians – for whom Mr Warmington appears to be the stalking horse – to undermine and erode confidence in the IC.

Their ultimate aim, as deduced from proposals tabled by Mr Warmington for overhauling the Integrity Commission Act, is to place the IC under the thumbs of politicians and render it, at best, flaccid and ineffective.

The specific discussion, however, stems from Parliament’s review last week of an additional allocation of J$193.3 million – bringing its budget for this fiscal year to J$2 billion – in the supplementary estimates tabled by Dr Clarke.

In questioning the minister about the increased allocation, Mr Warmington claimed: “We haven’t seen an audit of that department (the Integrity Commission) tabled in this House, but they are spending taxpayers’ money.”

He insisted that the matter be rectified, declaring: “I am saying minister that we (must) get an audit report from that department before the next financial year.

“There is no way that we are going to approve another $2 billion for a department that has not been audited for years. OK. So, I expect that the audit will be laid here before March next year.”

DESERVED PUSHBACK

Given the facts, this display of ignorance – we refuse to deem or accept as deliberate misinformation – deserved pushback and record-setting.

Instead, Dr Clarke, perhaps to preserve political comity and to avoid a tangle with the notoriously rude and obstreperous Mr Warmington, said: “I don’t think any reasonable person could object to your requirements. These are public funds. And I have no reason to expect that that’s a difficult proposition.”

The fact, though, is that for the past six years, as is required by the law, the Integrity Commission has sent reports to Parliament of its activities for the previous year. Those reports, including the latest one, for 2023/2024, which was tabled in June, include audited accounts.

The IC’s latest financial statements were audited by CR Hylton and Company, a Jamaican firm that is part of the network of SFAI Global, an international auditing and consulting company headquartered in Malta. It was originally based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.

As the Integrity Commission pointed out, Mr Warmington is a member of Parliament’s Integrity Commission Oversight Committee (ICOC). One of the ICOC’s functions, as was reiterated at a meeting of the committee the day before the MP’s spectacular intervention, is to review reports from the IC.

Maybe Mr Warmington genuinely missed that the audited financial statements are contained in the commission’s annual reports, rather than, as the IC implied might have been the case, that he failed to read the document. After all, the statements are appendix seven of the report, and in the digital version of the document there are two mostly blank pages before the start of C R Hylton’s review of the commission’s finances.

KNOWN BETTER

Although we err on the side of Mr Warmington’s ignorance rather than contend that his behaviour was one of deliberate mischief, he, too, ought to have known better.

In 2021, at a meeting of the ICOC, Mr Warmington questioned Ms Monroe Ellis’ membership of the Integrity Commission because he believed, wrongly, that it was constitutionally prohibited. He also rejected the IC’s use of external auditors, given the Constitution’s requirement that all departments and offices of the government fall under, and are subject to audits by, the auditor general.

However, the Integrity Commission Act not only obligates the IC to keep accounts, but says that “such accounts shall be audited annually by an auditor appointed each year by the commission with the approval of the minister of finance”. Which happens to be, as it has been since 2018, Dr Clarke.

At that October 2021 meeting of ICOC, Marlene Malahoo Forte, then the attorney general, and therefore the government’s legal advisor, said the arrangement for the use of external auditors, was a “practical one”, given that the legislation made the auditor general, ex officio, an IC commissioner.

Since then, there has been no question about the constitutionality of Ms Monroe Ellis’ place on the commission or of the auditing of its accounts.

In any event, that was not the burden of Mr Warmington’s contention last week. His erroneous claim was that Parliament had received no audited financial statements from the IC.

We see Mr Warmington’s action as part of a mission to kill the IC by a thousand cuts.

No one, especially people for whom decency counts, should support, or enable, that macabre effort.