Watchdogs call for INSPORTS probe

With the Institute of Sports (INSPORTS) failing since 1992 to file audited financial statements annually as mandated by law, there are calls for the relevant authorities to launch investigations into the state agency to see whether billions of dollars in taxpayers’ money are properly accounted for.

INSPORTS falls under the Ministry of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport and up to late Friday, there was no response from Permanent Secretary Denzil Thorpe to questions submitted by The Sunday Gleaner on Wednesday about the full extent of INSPORTS’s tardiness, which is in breach of the Public Bodies Management and Accountability Act (PBMAA).

“It has not been fully resolved, but the process has started,” Thorpe said on Wednesday, referring to the efforts to bring INSPORTS into compliance.

“I can’t give any details about the process,” he added, before requesting, during a second telephone call, that the questions be sent to him via email.

There were blank spaces for INSPORTS under ‘date of submission to Cabinet’ and ‘period covered by last report’ in the latest update report published on September 20 by the Cabinet Office on the 161 state agencies legally required to submit annual reports.

But a 2017 special report by the Auditor General’s Department (AuGD) revealed that “INSPORTS has never submitted annual reports and the last audited financial statement submitted was for the financial year 1991-1992”.

INCEPTION AND OBJECTIVE

The entity was established in 1978 and tasked with the promotion, development and implementation of sporting activities at the community and parish levels.

“INSPORTS’s failure not only breached the law, but is worrying from a fiduciary responsibility position, given that its accounting records showed that for the six-year period 2005-06 to 2010-11, total revenues amounted to $1.4 billion, while expenditure totalled $1.5 billion,” the AuGD report said, noting that similar governance issues were flagged at the entity in a 2011 report to Parliament.

Jeanette Calder, executive director of Jamaica Accountability Meter Portal (JAMP), believes that “in our quest to plug where billions [of dollars] are siphoned yearly, the Financial Investigations Division and/or the Major Organised Crime and Anti-Corruption Agency could provide answers to questions that have gone unaddressed for over two decades”.

“If this is not a public body in dire need of such investigations, then which else would be?” Calder questioned.

“What is the message being sent when taxpayers are informed that they are fully financing the utility bills, salaries, rent, programmes and projects of a public body, but for more than two decades have not benefited from any financial report to assure us that the funds are going where they should?”

While noting that the breach by INSPORTS may be exceptional, Professor Trevor Munroe, principal director of the National Integrity Action (NIA), said lawless disregard for the reporting requirements of the PBMAA “remains the order of the day” among agencies that issued over 21,000 contracts, costing over $167 billion of taxpayers’ money during the 2020-21 financial year alone.

LAWLESS LACK OF TRANSPARENCY

“This lawless lack of transparency by entities spending billions of taxpayers’ money continues despite Ministry of Finance circular #15 [August 2020)] directing an end to chronic violations of reporting requirements,” Munroe said.

“The public must demand that not only the lowly who breach the DRMA (Disaster Risk Management Act) mask-wearing rule be fined, but also the well connected in high places who annually are responsible for spending billions of our money and each year continue to breach the PBMAA reporting requirements with absolutely no consequences.”

Section 25 (2) of the PBMAA allows a parish court judge to impose a pecuniary penalty not exceeding $1 million on the “person concerned” where an entity fails to submit annual reports and audited financial statements.

The sanction – one of two listed under the subsection – is triggered by an application from the Attorney General’s Chambers (AGC), according to the legislation.

Calder disclosed that through the Access to Information Act, she sought answers from the AG’s office in 2016 on whether any breach of the PBMAA was placed before the courts.

The JAMP boss said she was given access to 15 notices the AGC dispatched in 2014 to 15 public bodies that had financial statements outstanding for a minimum of three years. INSPORTS was not among those entities, she disclosed.

The notices, she said, gave each entity three months to become fully compliant or face the courts.

“Out of 15 public bodies, 14 were compliant within three months. One requested an extension,” she said.

“It tells me that we do have a mechanism to leverage. It is a threat, but that is what the law is there for.”

But Calder said four years later in October last year, there was a different response from the AGC when JAMP requested the same information – how many applications were made to the courts between 2015 and 2020; the names of the entities involved and in how many cases were sanctions imposed.

“Since that worked so beautifully when nothing else seems to be able to work, then surely the attorney general’s office and the permanent secretaries [who have to trigger the legislation] would be using this tool,” she said.

“We were advised by way of letter on June 22, 2021 that this time around they ‘have no official documents to share’ relating to that request,” Calder said.

“So, despite the impressive success of achieving compliance with our accountability laws, the [AGC] received no further instructions to act in this manner against delinquent public bodies.”

livern.barrett@gleanerjm.com