Authorities in distress

WHY IS it so impossible for state-run authorities, utilities and agencies to operate with the same efficiency as enterprises of the private sector? This question may now appear boringly rhetorical to many, given the notoriously bad history of government-run bodies, a fact that has become accepted as virtually part of the culture of public sector operations. Still, out of a sense of despair, we moved to ask it after hearing testimony about the performance of the National Housing Authority and the Airports Authority given at Wednesday’s sitting of the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament.

Why are such debilitating weaknesses, deficiencies, lack of proper systems and succession planning be permitted to persist in these state-run organisations? Again we can cite the popular answer to this question - that no one really cares, since no one will be held responsible, no one will be disciplined, no one will be fired or suffer the loss of benefits thanks to their “tenure in office,” and no one will really be bothered if the organisation succeeds or fails since, whatever the outcome, it can always rely on the inexhaustible resources of the Central Government. It would be unfair, of course, to hold NHA CEO Noel Garcia responsible for the failure of the NHA to submit financial reports for the past seven years, since he is relatively new to the job. But the scenario he has outlined to account for the NHA’s inability to comply with this legal necessity provides a dismal and depressing insight into its operations. The Authority has been without a financial controller since 2002, it had experienced a high turn-over of staff, it suffered previously from poor record keeping, it lost many of its records in a flood during the 1990s and had technical problems in evaluating its assets and in making provisions for bad debts.

Handicapped by such a catalogue of woes, can this Authority ever achieve the efficiency of a private business enterprise? Now we can understand why the housing authority has been so impotent in dealing with the escalating problem of defaulters and why, as Garcia admitted, bad debts in mortgages and rents run into hundreds of millions of dollars. And why, as PAC chairman Gerald Yetming pointed out, a billion dollars cannot be accounted for in the absence of NHA’s financial reports. A similar travail seems to have affected the Airports Authority in its failure to submit annual financial reports since 1998. According to General Manager Rosalind Chinna-Ramdeen the authority was hampered by missing or seized documents, the exodus of staff through VSEP in 1998 and 1999, and unqualified financial personnel. We are quite baffled by her revelation that, as a result of the VSEP, the authority suffered a serious loss of trained accounting staff with considerable institutional knowledge.

Could such an absurdity happen in a private business organisation? While a voluntary severance plan is intended to reduce personnel in an over-staffed organisation, could the Airports Authority not have limited it to redundant employees, or make some extra effort to ensure that there would be no drain of essential officers? And why did it take until November 2001 for a Financial Accountant with accounting qualification to be appointed? If this is the level of “efficiency” that obtains among state bodies then it appears to us that this sector is in the throes of a silent crisis. Who supervises the operations of these authorities? What are the respective ministries or ministers doing about them? Can an efficiency consultant from the private sector be called in to look at them?