Mayor orders audits of CitCo Departments
Darrell Bradley
Since the municipal elections, Mayor Darrell Bradley hired a team of professionals to examine and straighten out the mechanics of city hall. Everything from financial practices to the health of the working environment are under review. Bradley told News Five that audits of most of the departments of city hall are being carried out to provide efficiency and accountability.
Darrell Bradley, Belize City Mayor
“We have put in place a revised audit team and this audit team will comprise of three entities. We have an external auditor; we’re bringing on board Castillo Sanchez and Burrell and they have already begun—I’ve had two meetings with them—and they have already commenced a full audit of the financial position of the City Council. And they will indicate to us what controls we need to put in place to plug some of those holes to ensure that any kind of misappropriation of funds—it will be difficult to do that—and I think that this will help us and it will be a really substantial tool to ensure that the financial health of the City Council is strong. What we need to do is an audit done—they indicated to us that it will take between four to six weeks to have that—and when we have that report, we will make it public so that people can know exactly what are the inflows of city hall and how their monies are being spent in terms of the key priority areas. The second thing we will do is that we will have an internal audit committee and I myself will chair this committee. And we will have representation from outside parties: independent bodies, stakeholders who are interested in the financial health of the City Council so that anything concerning financing; if there is any irregularity, it can be made public so that the public can pressure us to take changes. And then I have also taken steps to replace our internal auditor. We are interviewing persons right now for the post of Chief Internal Auditor and we really mean to get a person who is of the highest integrity and somebody who is very highly qualified. So that the internal audit function can be very, very strong. One of the things that kinda surprised me is the internal auditor missed the issue with this particular employee and the irregularities. It was actually caught by our HR personnel because it involved overtime. That is something that an internal auditor should never ever miss. And what we mean to do with the internal audit function is to have a series of continuous audits of all City Council functions. And we will put together an audit work program. We are talking about auditing of payables, auditing of receivables, auditing of the equipment of the City Council. We’re talking about doing a audit of our human resources so that we can ensure that we are maximizing personnel at City hall. And these things will feed back to the office of mayor and we will be able to make corrective action based on sound financial advice.”
We’ll have more on the mayor’s interview on Friday.
