JUTC job spree - Phillips warns bus company on collision course if it doesn’t switch lanes
Published:Thursday | July 30, 2020 | 12:21 AM
Opposition spokesman in charge of the transport portfolio Mikael Phillips is demanding that the Ministry of Finance and Public Service take charge of the operations of the troubled Jamaica Urban Transit Company (JUTC) amid damning findings in an audit.
“JUTC will be dead by next year this time if we continue to operate it like this,” the opposition spokesman warned.
His comments come as the JUTC board of directors has summoned senior managers to a meeting this morning.
The assessment by the Pamela Monroe-led Auditor General’s Department cited a pile-up of extensive and egregious breaches, including JUTC’s management exceeding the overtime budget by $728.6 million despite excess staff capacity.
The report, which was tabled in Parliament on Tuesday, highlighted a lack of transparency in recruitment practices at the state-run bus company, including the hiring of the managing director who only had a high-school diploma on file despite the job requiring a postgraduate degree and 10 years’ experience at the senior level. Other managerial and supervisory hires also breached human resource rules.
According to the auditor general, the JUTC has continuously experienced financial losses despite a significant subsidy of $3.3 billion each year from the Government for the period FY2014-15 to FY2017-18.
Every year for the period covered by the audit showed that overtime costs overshot the budget by more than $100 million. The worst year was FY2014-15 when there was a $175.6 million difference between what as alloted and what was paid.
“We saw no evidence that the JUTC leveraged the unapproved excess capacity to reap operational gains, especially in key positions,” the report stated.
At the Spanish Town and Ashenheim JUTC locations, the auditor general found evidence that overtime claims ranged between 71 per cent and 182 per cent of employees’ annual salaries.
“Some employees’ names reoccurred over the period, which suggested a reliance on overtime by these employees,” the auditor general asserted.
The auditor general found that the JUTC did not contain employment within its approved establishment, contrary to the guidelines, as 508 unapproved positions were being operated as at July 2019, costing the entity $1.15 billion for the period April 2014 to July 2019.
Yet still, there was an 11.6 per cent decline in available bus service between FY2014-15 and FY2018-19.
Also, there has been a dramatic 36.5 per cent decline in ridership between FY2014-15 and FY2018-19.
Calls to Chairman Russell Hadeed and Managing Director Paul Abrahams rang without answer on Wednesday.
Phillips, in reacting to the findings, told The Gleaner that the JUTC is suffering from mismanagement.
While declaring that he was against a fare increase to prop up revenues for the company, Phillips suggested that theJUTC take back profitable routes, downsize, and rationalise.
“It is like we are just taking $8 billion in subsidy and just throwing it into a barrel,” he said, suggesting that there was little to show for the billions pumped into the JUTC since its founding in 1999.
The management, especially the human-resource personnel, should come under scrutiny for the breaches identified in the audit, Phillips insisted, disclosing that the company would be made to account at the Public Administration and Appropriations Committee of Parliament