The Auditor General's Office is the Supreme Audit Institution of Belize - that has the duty to "hold the government accountable for its stewardship of public funds." That line comes straight out of their mission statement - but for the past many years, the office has not being doing a stellar job of that.
And this important office is now without a leader after the most recent Auditor General,Dorothy Bradley's contract was not renewed.
So, the post is still vacant - and what's making news tonight is that government is advertising for this important, constitutionally enshrined post to be filled by a contract officer.
It seems counterintuitive to the purpose of good governance to have a contract officer without tenure trying to hold the government to account. One wrong move, and there goes the contract...
We asked the Prime Minister today if putting a contract officer in this important post defeats the purpose of the office's independence.
John Briceno, Prime Minister
"No absolutely not because then you have a contract and that contract gives you independence. Once you have a contact, once you live up to what you have in the contract, then they can't tell you in effect what to do. We tried to work through the public service ministry, the public service commission, trying to see if we could find someone adequate and I don't think we succeeded. I have not been following it personally but from what I've been told, we have not found somebody that we believe is adequate but if there's someone in the public service that believes they can do it, they could apply for the post. Again, it shows you a fundamental flaw in the whole public service structure that.. the public service is almost like a pear, the workers, that you have a small top and the bottom is huge and the middle, we don't have much of middle management, people that can be trained to be able to go to the top. Now, I'm not casting blame on just one, it's something that has happened overtime and it would take a change in mindset, yes, on the politician, but especially for the public officers to say that, let's start to bring in people that can really do the job. We have excellent public officers, I want to make that very clear, they sacrificed to be working with government, they could be in the private sector making more."
"But there are many instances that others come in just because they want a job so whenever people ask you for a job, I always say, why do you want to work in the government? Go to the private sector, there are so many opportunities. We need to find a way to build up the capacity within the government, the pool of employees. And I say that cautiously, I don't want the president of the PSU to go crazy and say oh, I'm attacking, I'm not, I'm just stating the challenge that we have and I wish we could sit down together to find a way how we can address it."
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