Challenge for Ombudsman

The 45th Report of the Ombudsman, covering the year 2022, offered troubling insights into citizens’ difficulty in obtaining adequate service from the public service.

Several cases in the report tell the stories of specific, significant challenges ordinary people have faced in getting fair treatment. In this, the public service demonstrates no favours, refusing, for instance, to countenance the compensation claims of an 81-year-old woman until the case was settled 12 years later through the Ombudsman’s intervention.

Mr Rajmanlal Joseph was appointed Ombudsman in June 2021. The office-holder is vested with the powers of a High Court judge and acts as an officer of Parliament.

Since then, it seems his entire role has been defined by the appalling circumstances that beset citizens trying to get what should be routine, regular business done with the public sector. He has pushed mightily against these travesties of customer service.

In September 2021, after declaring the 14-year delay in resolving the complaint of an Elections and Boundaries clerk “unconscionable,” he made the case his first personal intervention, after multiple letters to the Solicitor General were ignored while his office was trying to manage the matter.

The Solicitor General finally agreed to a $40,000 award for compensation for a workplace injury in 2007 – five months after the clerk had died. An incredible 15 years after the original incident, the public service began the process for making payments to the estate of the deceased.

The Ombudsman’s reports point to an institutional disregard by state agencies for the very people they were created to serve.

After issuing two summonses to the CEO to appear in the hearing of a case against the Tunapuna/Piarco Regional Corporation, Mr Joseph began summary criminal proceedings against the apparently uninterested regional corporation boss.

In the 44th Annual Report, Mr Joseph cited as an area of concern the non-payment of employee contributions to the National Insurance Board, noting that its Compliance Department was not effective.

He further noted lengthy delays even when claims were submitted with all required documents, describing the NIB’s approach as “dispassionate.” He found similar failings in the Social Welfare Division’s delays in payment of the senior citizen’s pension to vulnerable retirees.

In many incidents outlined in the Casebook of the Ombudsman, his importance is clear and unequivocal.

Absent someone acting with judicial authority, and hence empowered to issue a summons to stoke action, many of these cases might never have reached a satisfactory resolution.

These reports raise the question of what happens to these findings, because the Ombudsman is only empowered to solve individual cases put to him by the public. Who takes up these systemic failures, to ensure that such wrongs are not repeatedly committed against other hapless taxpayers?