While Mayor Zenaida Moya is at home with her newborn son, all hell is breaking
loose at the City Council, where the findings of an official special audit of
the practice of under-depositing are proving explosive. This afternoon Acting
Mayor Dion Leslie convened an emergency caucus of the council to discuss the
special audit and to hold a meeting with three employees who are singled out
in the audit for wrongdoing or engaging in irregular practices. 7News has received
details of the 12 page memorandum addressed to the Mayor which outlines the
major points in the report.
But to make you understand them, we’d have to backtrack a little. Remember
on July 14 when the Mayor and her financial management team laid out on the
table a sheaf of what we were told were receipts accounting for twenty-seven
thousand dollars in under-deposits for April of this year? Well, it turns out
that some of them were not receipts, after all. In some cases, they were pro-forma
invoices or genuine receipts but not for the month in question. Actually, documents
purporting to value $19,677.50 were bogus for one reason or another.
That means that of the just over $30,000 in under-deposits for April of 2009,
almost twenty thousand remains un-accounted for. The audit report concludes
that, “the council deliberately presented payments that were already
paid in one period – to cover monies that were unaccounted for in another.”
In one case, we are informed that receipts issued in January were presented
to cover April’s under-deposits.
In the vast scheme of non-standard accounting, those twenty thousand dollars
in bogus covering documents is small change because the figures for January,
February, March and April of 2009 show combined under-deposits amounting to
$274,667.46 - that’s over a quarter million dollars! Here’s how
it’s broken down: $52,493.59 in January, $86,534.61 in February and a
whopping $101,948.81 in March. Again, those are under-deposits, the cash taken
out of the Council’s bank deposits with the authority of the financial
controller’s office – he claims it was done to cover expenses and
make payments that the council could not do by checque.
Most of those under-deposit figures are unaccounted for because – and
get this – the file dealing with them was stolen from right inside the
City Council. Sounds like something from out of a movie, right? But, it’s
real! The report discloses that the government auditors were given the file
and they stored it in the office that the council had provided. But the room
was broken into and only that file which contained the under-deposit information
for the months of January to March was stolen. Unbelievable but true, and the
audit report laments that the council never reported the break in and theft
to police.
But if the file with all the documents for under-deposits from January to March
was stolen, then the Mayor and her managers are off the hook, right? Not so
fast; the audit notes that the loss of files does not absolve the council from
responsibility to produce these files. In view of this and other irregularities,
the audit concludes that, the mayor and her senior management over-rode their
internal control system....and that such over-riding opens the door for illegality.
Among the irregularities cited in the audit are that council workers were paid
out of council funds for campaign activities. The audit also found that phantom
entries were listed for payments having been made to council employees –
when in truth they never got paid. Of course, they were never the wiser, because
they never did anything to earn the payments – it appears to have simply
been a way to facilitate the movement of money.
If you’re shaking your head, so are those in the senior ranks of government.
The Prime Minister told us that he is “extremely disturbed” and
has directed that the audit report be forwarded to the DPP. He expects that
whoever is responsible will be held fully accountable – even if it means
bringing criminal charges.
And while the Mayor is responsible for the Finance portfolio at City Hall –
the blame it appears will rest with the senior personnel in the Finance Department
since in almost all cases, their signatures were on the documents. Of course,
the Mayor isn’t around to defend herself, because she has a four day old
son to nurse – and that’s what makes the political situation so
fluid because acting mayor Dion Leslie is no ally of Mayor Moya – which
is why a hearing was held with the council’s finance department employees
who are considered two of the mayor’s most loyal allies.
Mayor Zenaida Moya responded to our request for a comment by saying that she
has not gotten a copy of the audit and yet and will not comment until she sees
it. The man sitting in her chair, Deputy Mayor Dion Leslie told us that the
council got its copy today and he immediately called an emergency caucus to
get to the bottom of it because they were elected to safeguard public funds.
The timing of the audit’s release is interesting because we are told
the document is dated first September, yet, perhaps strategically, it reached
the council in the mayor’s absence. In the meantime, it’s a developing
story and we’ll keep watching it.
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