GOB addressing issues in Belize’s Auditor General’s Office

The Government of Belize says that while it continues to search for a new Auditor General it is addressing issues within the office. Recently three senior members of the important office revealed that they hadn’t been assigned any audits to conduct for two years. The officers, all with Master’s Degrees, wrote to the Public Service Commission drawing their attention to the concerns and calling for intervention.Yesterday, Minister of Public Service Henry Charles Usher was asked about the complaint and suggested the situation may have been exaggerated.

Henry Charles Usher, Minister of Public Service: “It’s an issue that we have been trying to resolve at the Ministry of Public Service looking at the human resource challenges within the Office of the Auditor General. I’m not sure if they didn’t have anything at all to do, it’s very rare that a public officer has nothing to do at all. But I do believe that there could have been more tasks assigned to these individuals and that’s why I said whoever assumes the post of Auditor General also has to be a good manager, has to be a good human resource manager in terms of being able to task out the different auditors within the office to go and do the different audits so it is a challenge that we’ve been working on from the Ministry’s perspective but we also have to be careful not to interfere too much in the independence of that office because remember that office is an independently established office under the constitution so it’s not like we can just go in and dictate how their operations are supposed to be done. We can’t go in and tell the Auditor General’s Office oh you have to do these audits. They have an audit plan, they carry out that audit plan and in terms of their operational objectives that’s something that the Auditor General herself or himself would have to do but in terms of the issue that you raised just now it as one that came to our attention and we were trying to intervene yes.”

At the meeting of the House of Representatives last week, the government passed a motion to appoint Deputy Auditor General Maria Rodriguez as Acting Auditor General for four months. Rodriguez will hold the position while the post is being advertised.