Senior Investigative Reporter
shaliza.hassanali@guardian.co.tt
In a few days, the Government will go back to the House of Representatives with the Integrity Testing (Polygraph Bill).
National Security Minister Fitzgerald Hinds told Guardian Media that the bill will require law enforcement officers and workers at the Board of Inland Revenue, Customs and Excise Division, Immigration Division, Fire Service and the Registrar General office, among others, to submit to lie detector testing.
He said the legislation is aimed at building public confidence in these institutions and providing a level of integrity. Opposition support will be needed to pass the bill.
Hinds, noting that there are instances where people don’t have confidence in elements of law enforcement, said: “My job as minister is to constantly work with law enforcement to ensure that we recruit, we train, we test constantly... which is why I introduced into the Parliament... and we would be back into the Parliament in a few days to continue the debate on mandatory of involuntary polygraph and other integrity testing of our officers.
“So, all of these departments, we have gone to Parliament to ask that personnel working there with access to highly classified information could be involuntary, mandatorily, spontaneously on certain specified conditions be integrity tested.”
Hinds said this is to ensure that workers in these offices will be beyond reproach “so they can share the information without fear of some kind of backlash.”
Hinds said when the Government first went to Parliament with the bill, “because these affected some of the constitutional rights, we would have required super majorities, special majorities in the Parliament.” However, they did not get the UNC’s support.
“We, the Government, feel that it is so critical because the UNC complain about corruption in the law enforcement and these services and when it is time in Parliament for them to use their parliamentary vote to take legal measures and put them in place to prevent and to detect some of those behaviours, they do not want to do it. So, we do have some impediments in that regard,” he said.
Hinds said there are many police officers with integrity who, “if they speak openly, will let you know that they have concerns about some of their own colleagues and therefore these measures will assist them in knowing who will be watching their back.”
Police officers undergo polygraph tests on entry into the TTPS. The test is also administered when officers want to voluntarily go into “certain specialist areas that expose them to a high level of confidential police information.”
He said once an officer joins the service, anything can happen after that.
“They can become compromised along the way but there is nothing to test you after that, in accordance with the law,” he said.