Support grows for lifting of veil from contract award reports

The tightly held “secret and confidential” information in relation to Quarterly Contract Award (QCA) reports of public bodies may once again see the light of day as officials at Jamaica’s single anti-corruption body continue to push for an amendment to the Integrity Commission Act, allowing it to be published on the agency’s website.

Members of a joint select committee reviewing the five-year-old Integrity Commission Act indicated on Tuesday that a recommendation by the anti-corruption watchdog to allow for the QCA reports to be published on its website has deep merit and should be considered in proposed changes to the law.

Currently, Section 56 of the Integrity Commission Act restricts the investigative body from uploading the QCA on its website, a provision that casts a shadow over transparency in relation to the publication, by the commission, of the award of contracts by public bodies.

St Andrew South East Member of Parliament Julian Robinson wants the QCA to be exempted from the strictures of the confidential and secrecy requirements set out in Section 56.

The legislation states that persons employed to the Integrity Commission “shall regard and deal with as secret and confidential, all information, statutory declarations, government contracts, prescribed licences and all other matters relating to any matter before the commission ...”.

The only exception set out in Section 56 for making matters public is in Section 42(3)(b), which relates to the statutory declarations of the prime minister and the leader of the Opposition that are to be published annually in the gazette by the Integrity Commission.

“I think that we should explicitly state as an exception something like the quarterly routine publication of contracts which would have gone through the public procurement process,” said Robinson.

A similar view was expressed by Tova Hamilton, member of parliament for Trelawny Northern.

“I personally don’t see why the Integrity Commission is prevented from disclosing these, subject to the same exclusions as the ATI (Access to Information Act),” she said.

Continuing, she said that “the principle of the disclosure of contracts and licences, I have no difficulty with that”.

Chairman of the committee and Leader of Government Business Edmund Bartlett acknowledged the contributions of committee members on amending the legislation to allow the commission to publish QCA reports.

“We seem to be getting a consensus that this particular recommendation has deep merit, and to be considered, and that we will make suitable adjustments subject to further guidance,” he said.

The Office of the Contractor General (OCG), one of three oversight bodies that had been subsumed into the Integrity Commission, had published the QCA reports on its website.

At Tuesday’s sitting of the parliamentary committee examining the Integrity Commission Act, Greg Christie, executive director of the agency, sought to justify the recommendation for the law to be adjusted to allow for the commission to publish QCA reports.

Christie told committee members that during his tenure as contractor general, he tried to bring transparency to the Government’s contract awards process.

He said that under the previous dispensation, public bodies were graded by the then OCG.

“We could sit at our desks and basically monitor the government contract process by looking at the algorithms or red flags that were built in to tell us if it is something that we need to visit that office or if we need to trigger an investigation,” Christie explained.

He said it also allowed the OCG to build up a massive database on government contracts. Christie said that the Integrity Commission was still gathering information on government contracts.

However, he said that the then OCG placed the information on its website and it meant that “anybody in Jamaica could freely go in and query it and you could put in the name of a government contractor and it could tell you how many contracts that person have got from 2006 until now, who issued them, the value, whether they were sole source or competitive bidding... it is a powerful tool”.

He said it is an electronic database that allows the media or anybody to carry out research on government contracts.

edmond.campbell@gleanerjm.com