But even when that post was filled, it's fair to say the reports were not streaming out of that office. The Auditor General is empowered to audit the accounts of all Accounting Officers and of all persons entrusted with the collection, receipt, custody, issue or payment of public moneys - that includes irregularities within both the central and local governments. So how did they miss the Innovabel land grab in Belmopan during the previous city administration?

And have there been any alarm bells going off in that department after two southern town administrators were sent home just months after the municipal election? Both the Punta Gorda and the Dangriga TA's say that their respective mayors wanted greater control of their council's administrative affairs, including finances.

So do those moves signal corruption within the councils? We asked the PM:

John Briceno, Prime Minister
"I don't know how you get to corruption before you even find out what's going on. Because there are many issues, many reasons why you get to that point. One, you don't get along, two, sometimes these town administrators believe that they're the mayor so they do as they wish. It could be that they are doing things that they should not have been doing and so it's easy for the town administrator to say, oh they don't want, because I want to. We don't tend to get involved immediately. Once that happens, if we see then more and more stuff comes to our attention, then we get involved. We have not received any issues about any of our mayors that they're trying to do anything illegal and if these town administrators believe so then they could get, everybody has my number, they could have sent me the information and I could assure you that we would look into it and we would not allow that to happen."

Reporter:
"But it seems also like a trend of municipal mis-governance when you add the issue in Belmopan, the previous City Administration with Innovabel, isn't this the type of corruption, this land grab, the type of corruption you used to rail against in opposition?"

John Briceno, Prime Minister
"I still rail against it. I don't think what was done by the previous council, if you notice most of the previous council were not allowed to run, including the mayor and for obvious reasons and those things should not be allowed to happen and it would take time to make sure that we would be able to move things in place to manage that. I think that in the case of Belmopan, we have a really good mayor. Very unassuming but determined, hardworking, and wanting to do well. He could have taken this immediately and made a big deal about it, he did not. He made sure that he put everything in place to find out what really happened and I think it wasn't even him, somebody leaked it out, so then afterwards he had to speak about it. It is wrong and I'm disappointed that even the previous council were trying to defend to say they wanted to give to the poor, yes we need to give to the poor, nobody would bash you for that but when you see who are the poor people that got it then it makes you question."