PAC Holds First Live-streamed Meeting

Dorothy Bradley

The Public Accounts Committee, chaired by Albert area representative Tracy Panton, held its first broadcasted session today from its seat in Belmopan.  In attendance were ministers Dolores Balderamos-Garcia and Kareem Musa, along with senators Elena Smith and Kevin Herrera. Appearing before the PAC working group was Auditor General Dorothy Bradley. During the meeting, Bradley detailed the challenges and deficiencies of recording completed financial statements in various government ministries.

Dorothy Bradley, Auditor General

“It started actually in 2004-2005 when at the Treasury, they had the former Accountant General Ms. Robateau and I think Mrs. Barrow would have been there at the time and efforts were made to try and clean up the accounts because there were lots of transactions hanging that were not properly posted and then that also caused delay.  Now, I can‘t give you the genesis of how all that came about, but up until that point there was a new Accountant General Mrs. Eck at the time and eventually I left the General Sales Tax and I went over to the Treasury as Assistant Accountant General.  And then through CARTAC, we got assistance and then we were given the opportunity to work with Barbados, the treasury, and Jamaica, but we spent a lot of time in Barbados because throughout the Caribbean, interestingly, we are experiencing the same challenges and so they were ahead of us, Barbados was ahead of us and so we actually sat with them, networked with them and then we used the concept of trying to, in an effort to try and clean up the accounts, we used, at that time we had designated a suspense account and those transactions that we did not find the proper documentation to properly book those accounts, those were logged temporarily in a suspense account and based on those initiatives we were able to start producing statements.  So I would say to you that maybe 2005-2006 weren‘t within the three-month period but we worked on that until 2011, statements were being produced.  So those were parts of the challenges also.  I would say to you that the independence of the office is also a challenge.”