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Thousands of Dollars Unaccounted For at City Hall
posted (September 15, 2009)

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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