When agencies charged by law to
produce documents in a timely fashion fail to do so it is only right that they
face some sort of consequence.Cayman Airways felt the prod of
penalty earlier this year when the United States Department of Transportation
fined Cayman’s national carrier $50,000 for being late in reporting the number
and types of complaints the airline received during 2009 from disabled passengers.
The amount was reduced after the airline
cooperated with the US
department to correct the mistake.
But the point is, the US government
has in place penalty provisions for groups that don’t follow the letter of the
law.
Perhaps our own government should
take a lesson from our neighbours to the north.
The Caymanian Compass reported at
the end of October that more than 55 per cent of the government agencies
required to turn in financial statements to the Cayman Islands Auditor
General’s office for the 2009/10 budget year did not do so by the statutorily
mandated deadline.
Statutory authorities and
government-owned companies are supposed to submit financial statements by 31
August so auditors can review them by the 31 October deadline in order that
annual reports can be finalised and submitted to the Government.
This task can’t be completed this
year.
But that’s nothing new.
There stands a backlog of five
years in some government agencies of some annual reports, which include financial
statements.
If those statutory authorities and
government-owned companies were hit with hefty fines each time they were late
with their submissions, they might find the will to meet the letter of the law
in the future.
The threat of a $50,000 penalty
certainly got the attention of Cayman Airways and officials there worked
diligently to correct the problem and get the fine reduced.
We can all appreciate human error,
but for the government to have billions of unaudited government spending since
2004 is not acceptable – and it’s not human error.
Related Videos
It’s not clear if you are proposing to collect the fines from individual employees or the organisation as a whole.
The problem with the latter option is it would be the government fining the government so the money would just come out of public funds and the culprits would go unpunished. In fact there would be very little incentive to comply because it would be, as it always seems to be, someone else’s money they were wasting.
Isn’t the answer to simply hold the civil servants responsible in breach of the contracts of employment and either suspend them without pay until the figures are produced or fire them – that’s what any privately funded organisation would do.
As Mr. Evan’s has said, there would seem to be little point in fining a Government body or department. Instead, the people in charge of the departments concerned should either be made personally liable for any statutory fine and/ or summarily dismissed.
Either way you may get a result which is what is required.