The Tribune

By LAMECH JOHNSON

Tribune Staff Reporter

ljohnson@tribunemedia.net

THE College of the Bahamas now has a Chief Internal Auditor, the first since the institution was founded in 1974. The appointment is part of the drive towards university status and corresponds with COB’s efforts to lead national development.

During a convocation ceremony at the Harry C Moore Library, College Council chairman Alfred Sears welcomed Dural Thompson to the institution’s faculty and staff as a new member of the executive team.

“Mr Thompson is the Chief Internal Auditor and the internal auditing function is a very critical function” Mr Sears said.

“It is a function that requires independence. So he will not be reporting to the president as other members of the senior team. He reports directly to the council and specifically to the chairperson of the audit and finance committee.
“The audit function in any institution is to ensure integrity. To ensure that the limited resources that we have for the benefit of the institution are managed well and in accordance with the policies of the council. And in accordance with good corporate practice.”

Mr Thompson, who has been a senior auditor at Price Water House Coopers and a senior manager at Commonwealth Bank, will be responsible for assembling an independent audit department and ensuring the internal controls of the college are “robust and transparent”, the chairman noted.

Additionally, he and the department will to liaise with external auditors to ensure that the process is smooth “and we avoid what has happened in the past where the statutory audited financial statements of the institution are three and four years in arrears,” the chairman said.

Mr Sears said internal auditing is important because it will allow the college to “bring our financial reporting of our statements current and maintain the current delivery of audited financial statements to the Minister of Education who will lay them on the table of the House of Assembly.”

The announcement of Thompson’s appointment and the creation of an internal auditing department comes on the heels of an investigation by police into the misappropriation of funds from the COB business office late last year. The announcement that such an investigation was occurring followed a call for transparency from staff and student unions, who claimed as much as $12,000 had disappeared.

The college, in response, issued a statement saying it was currently in the process of hiring at the managerial level in an effort to “strengthen our financial management and oversight, and these appointments are going through the appropriate vetting process, including union involvement.”

The institution has a 2015 deadline for becoming the University of the Bahamas, a mandate given to the college by the government in summer of 2012.