Money for nothing

Speaking in the Senate on Thursday, Social Development Minister Donna Cox announced that 32 food cards were stolen from the unlocked drawer of a ministry employee in August.

The loss of the cards, charged with funds ranging between $5,000 and $39,000, was not reported to the ministry for two weeks.

Why were food cards, which represent an asset tradable for cash value, being kept in the unlocked drawer of an employee of the ministry? Why wasn’t the loss reported to the employee’s manager immediately? How are these cards being accepted by merchants who aren’t on the ministry’s list of approved vendors? And what has been done to prevent this happening again?

Ms Cox has been admirably open about the ministry’s fraud problem, but acknowledging a problem is not the same as fixing it.

The Auditor General’s report for 2021 found numerous examples of fraud and carelessness in the management of the Social Development Ministry’s substantial allocation.

The ministry was the State’s biggest spender, with an expenditure of $5.4 billion, closely followed by the Health Ministry at $5.3 billion. These numbers reflect the ministries’ roles in health management and as social-safety-network during the period under audit, at the height of the covid19 pandemic.

The Social Development Ministry’s budget was increased by $531 million, of which $4.7 billion was spent on the Senior Citizen’s Grant, Social Assistance and the Disability Grant.

In an analysis of the Senior Citizen’s Grant, the auditor general found 52,000 instances where the date-of-birth field was left blank. In 106,000 instances, the field was “NULL” – skipped during data entry.

Information capture also failed when cheques were issued without any record of their numbers. “Inconsistent” national ID numbers were found for 146,487 payees.

Ms Cox insisted two weeks ago in the House of Representatives that the ministry was working with the police to crack down on fraud.

She announced a week later that the ministry’s allocation had been cut by $182 million because of the report’s findings.

The Auditor General’s report points to fraud enabled by carelessness in record-keeping and flawed verification of identification information. These thefts should have been stopped at the desks of the ministry’s staff.

It’s not as if the Social Development Ministry hasn’t had offers from the private sector to work with it on the difficulties it faces. In June, WiPay offered a proposal for a system it has successfully used for the Living Water Community and which was used by Jamaica and Grenada to issue and verify the use of government grants. The ministry has made no public response to the receipt of that proposal.

Ms Cox must commit her ministry to changes that block the theft of taxpayer funds allocated to the less fortunate while simplifying access to those who genuinely need help.