Stronger leadership and a clearer chain of accountability for civil servants – not more legislation – are key to preventing public funds from being wasted, Auditor General Alastair Swarbrick told legislators at a hearing of the Public Accounts Committee last week.
Mr. Swarbrick said there is already a clear framework for the effective management of public money through existing legislation.
He said the real issue is that the rules were not enforced properly and no one had taken responsibility for putting in place policies and controls to ensure good governance.
“We are concerned that government is once again addressing significant governance and management issues with more legislation,” said Mr. Swarbrick.
Better management
He said a better management strategy is needed to ensure ethics and values are embedded in everything government does.
“Without taking some type of action along these lines, the Office of the Auditor General will undoubtedly continue to report systemic poor performance and the inability for government to provide transparent and accountable services to the people of the Cayman Islands,” he said in his opening remarks to the committee.
Several senior civil servants were called to answer questions on a series of reports released by the auditor in January highlighting systemic issues with governance in the Cayman Islands.
Financial Secretary Ken Jefferson acknowledged under questioning from legislators during Wednesday’s session that there were no real consequences for government ministries or authorities that failed to provide timely financial statements and annual reports detailing how they had spent public money.
“I can’t say there is a definite penalty for noncompliance. The penalty would come in the form of embarrassment for the ministry and the chief officer when it is publicly known they are noncompliant,” he said.
‘No carrot, no stick’
Other senior civil servants said they were attempting to introduce a system of rewards and consequences for staff in the civil service, but acknowledged there is still work to be done.
Jennifer Ahearn, chief officer in the Ministry of Health, said, “Performance management went quite quiet for some time because the system of increments and pay raises was frozen. There was a feeling among the civil service of ‘What’s the point? Why bother telling me what I’m doing right?’ There’s no carrot, there’s no stick.”
She said the civil service has recently begun reintroducing a system of staff evaluation. Gloria McField-Nixon, chief officer, Portfolio of the Civil Service, said the focus initially was on changing the culture within government and getting line managers used to filing employee performance reports.
She added, “We have other tools – non-financial rewards – that we can provide that we need to better utilize. We also need to make it easier for managers to punish persons who aren’t meeting performance requirements.”
Performance controls
Mr. Swarbrick suggested in his remarks to the committee that performance controls were a large part of the problem.
He added, “While the legislation is sufficiently clear on what needs to be done, and the roles and responsibilities of ministers, chief officers and boards of directors, no one has taken the leadership role to appropriately develop the policies, systems and practices to hold these entities to account and, more importantly, for these entities to operate effectively to deliver results for the people of the Cayman Islands.
“The continuing impact of this lack of accountability is a waste of public funds.”
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Stating the obvious and what most of us (non govt) people are thinking- do you really need legislation to enforce common sense or simple plain honesty?