At Senate, Rodolfo Bol Questioned over Alleged System Tampering by Audit
Rodolfo Bol is the Immigration Department’s former System Manager, and current I.T. Manager. He has been with the Department since 2004. He manages the passport machine system and border management system, as well as the Department’s internal network which connects the regional offices and international embassies from the U.S. to Taiwan. But Auditor General Dorothy Bradley, in her Special Audit Report on Passports, questioned whether Bol removed user roles for some users of the Belize Passport and Information System to conceal evidence after the start of the Audit investigation. Bol denied it and offered some explanation as to why they might think that way.
Mark Lizarraga, Senator, Business Community
“Did he commence this activity of changing roles or removing user roles, okay, or deactivating persons not a couple days after the audit team commence their investigation – in her words, to conceal evidence?”
Rodolfo Bol
Rodolfo Bol, Former Systems Manager, Immigration Department
“Just again to what I said no, what users do in the system cannot be changed, so updating a role or changing a password doesn’t conceal any information about what that person has been doing because it’s there.”
Aldo Salazar, Chair, Senate Special Select Committee
“Evidence suggested that IT personnel or BPIS which now we are calling it the MRP, users had the ability to remove the history of applicants. This was substantiated by the action of Mr. Rodolfo Bol, the system manager, when he removed the user roles for some users of the BPIS in an effort to conceal evidence. For me this is akin to criminal activity.”
Rodolfo Bol
“Yes, I understand.”
Aldo Salazar
“So I want to offer you the opportunity, ample opportunity, to refute, if you so choose, what is in this report about you, and tell us under what circumstances the Auditor General arrived at this conclusion. Did she speak to you about this? Did she show you any evidence? Did she confront you about her view that you were concealing something from her?”
Rodolfo Bol
“No, sir. She never did approached…”
Aldo Salazar
“Or her team?”
Rodolfo Bol
“They didn’t approach after whatever they did anything about this. What happened was that this was in 2013-2014. At the time we had only Ms. Bowen and myself and we have started working on the MIDAS installation which is our border management system, and we were overwhelmed with work, two systems, two of us, everything and, yes, when they inform us that users are no longer working with us, they would try to do multiple things. Either mark it inactive, put in no role, change password, one of the three, or of all of them; and yes, when this happened we looked on the users we had there – not with the intention to conceal any information but to make it mark the correct role that user is supposed to have. That doesn’t mean that the user access to it.”
