The Tribune

By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

DESTRUCTION of government documents at the Department of Social Services raises questions about whether fraud was perpetuated, Auditor General Terrance Bastian noted.

His view came in a report following an audit of the department for the period between July 2013 and June 2015 that was tabled in Parliament yesterday.

Among other things, Mr Bastian’s report exposed the way in which some employees committed fraud using food coupons intended for welfare recipients.

It highlighted internal weaknesses in which money is sometimes used to pay for services that clients don’t receive, contributing not only to waste of public funds but compromising of the health of clients as well.

In one instance, Mr Bastian discovered that a medical provider gave the DOSS a fictitious invoice for a medical procedure for one of the department’s clients.

The invoice was submitted despite the fact that medical provider’s own records showed that the client’s condition had deteriorated, making the client ineligible for the procedure.

“It should be noted,” Mr Bastian wrote, “that from the date of the request to the deposit of the payment, 255 days elapsed where no oversight or follow-up occurred to ascertain that this client was not only considered ineligible for the service but also died. However, a payment was still processed in the name of this client.”

To counteract problems like this, Mr Bastian said the DOSS should “implement procedures to detect and mitigate the risks associated with vendors receiving payment in advance of the provision of their services.”

Even while highlighting problems like this, Mr Bastian said he was “severely impeded” in his investigations by the destruction of government documents requested by the auditors, an act that contravenes the Public Service Bill.

“As a result, not all areas in the DOSS were covered by this audit,” he said. “Further, it was brought to our attention before the release of our audit report, that in addition to the documents discovered to be shredded…instructions were given in 2014 and 2015 for documents to be shredded. This act of gross negligence and indifference by staff members around the importance of retaining and protecting government documents further underscores our position in not being able to formulate a conclusion on the DOSS. The continued destruction of documents even during the audit process indicates that there may be a level of fraud being perpetrated within the department.”

Mr Bastian said during the audit, a DOSS staff member said a senior accounts staff member gave instructions to shred documents, including accounting items like “coupons, cheques, vendor statements, receipts and various types of accounting documents.”

“The separate acts perpetrated by accounting staff members reveal that there are obvious weak internal controls over the custody of accounting records within the accounts department and a severe lack of accountability around the same,” Mr Bastian said.