CitCo Opens Books for Annual Municipal Audit
Since Bradley took office in 2012, the council has made it a practice to open up its books for audit. It regularly makes that audit available to the public as part of its strategy for good governance. This year’s audit is underway and Mayor Bradley spoke about it to us today.
Darrell Bradley, Belize City Mayor
“The audit is the annual audit of the Belize City Council. We’ve been doing this for four years and this is part of our institutional strengthening and our accountability mechanisms. And one of the things that we are really saying is that we want to ensure that people can really trust the operations at City Hall so that the audit exercise is something that usually begins in the month of July or August and part of that exercise is that we have the auditors camped out in our conference room for a period of approximately about three weeks and they review all of our records and that’s what’s going on right now. And every year we would get our audit report before the end of the year so that we expect to have our fourth audit by the end of this year and as always we release that to members of the public. But this is our annual audit review; it is being done by Panel Ker Foster—that’s our auditor—they’ve been our auditors for the past two years. That’s an external auditing company so they are independent; that isn’t something that is government controlled. And we really want that to be part of our brand—that we are talking about not only the public feeling good about the city, but we are talking about building a city that can stand up to our brand; that is a city that is accountable and transparent. That when we go abroad or when we go to our citizens and say this is what we stand for, they can have confidence in that.”