Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley has described the impasse at he offices of the Auditor General and Finance Ministry as “unnecessary, dangerous bacchanal.”
Speaking with the media at the Conference Room at the Piarco International Airport yesterday, Rowley, when asked about the legal tussle between the Auditor General and Finance Minister, said he was disappointed.
The two officeholders, Finance Minister Colm Imbert and Auditor General Jaiwantie Ramdass have been at odds for weeks. The most recent episode in the saga is the court deciding to give an undertaking to rule on June 3, if a probe ordered by Imbert into the genesis of the impasse will be allowed to proceed.
The two officeholders threatened to sue each other after the Auditor General alleged she was being forced to add information to her audit report that was sent outside of the stipulated time frame.
Parliament was forced to have special sittings extending the time for the Treasury to submit financial statements to the Auditor General under Section 24:1 of the Exchequer and Audit Act and to extend the period of time for the Auditor General to prepare and submit reports on the same, pursuant to Section 25:1 of the Exchequer and Audit Act.
Minister Imbert, at a post-Cabinet media conference last Thursday said the investigation aims to unearth what caused an error that resulted in an understatement of revenue of $2,599,278,188.72, triggering the impasse between the two offices. The error was from switching from a manual cheque-clearing system to an electronic cheque-clearing software. The switch came in February last year with attempts internally between the Central Bank and the Board of Inland Revenue to rectify it.
When asked about it yesterday, Rowley said, “I am quite surprised at this development and very disappointed that it would have happened. There is an investigation taking place and I, like everyone else, would want to see what the investigation says because this is not the kind of thing that I anticipated.”
He added that he was first told of the issue in early March. With decades of parliamentary experience, he said auditor reports are not something that normally “turns the country upside down.”
“As Prime Minister of the country I don’t take likely a public official, especially one in audit, that says to the rest of the world that the Finance Minister is engaged in backdating the books. That is a very, very serious allegation with far-reaching consequences,” he said.
He recalled a few years ago an international rating company threatened to downgrade the country after an error was detected and later corrected. He said the body found that the corrected error suggested there was something untoward.
“You could imagine when the Auditor General is saying to the world that the Minister of Finance has backdated the finances and all kinds of interpretations being put on that alleged action?”
He said he was forced to look on “helplessly” after learning of the disagreement in March which became public in April. He said throughout the ordeal he had no input in any of it.
Rowley said a problem required a sane and sober response but instead, it descended into “unnecessary, dangerous bacchanal.”