Government and Opposition members of the Public Accounts (Enterprises) Committee were critical of the Education Facilities Company Ltd (EFCL) yesterday for failing to provide information upon request after almost a year. Yesterday’s meeting at Tower D, Waterfront Complex was aborted after 15 minutes. The meeting with the EFCL started almost an hour after the scheduled 11 am start as the members of the PA(E)C were said to be in a closed meeting for about two hours.
PA(E)C chairman Opposition Senator Fitzgerald Hinds said in a letter dated May 18, 2012, the EFCL was given a two-week deadline to provide certain information to the committee. He said on May 29, the EFCL wrote to the committee requesting a one-month extension to provide the information. The extension was granted on May 29, but by June 30 the committee had not got a response from the EFCL.
Hinds said the PA(E)C then wrote the EFCL on November 5, requesting a response within two weeks. A day later, he said, the EFCL supplied its response in a “very voluminous document,” but the committee reviewed the document at a meeting in January 8, 2013 “and this committee was not satisfied with your responses received.” Hinds said the committee wrote again “requesting specific details on the same questions that we had previously asked as early as May 2012.”
On Friday, he said, the committee received a voluminous document with the answers, but was not able to address the matter because of time constraints. Hinds said the committee was unimpressed that the ECFL took a year to supply the requested answers. He said the meeting will reconvene on June 7. But before the meeting ended, EFCL chairman Lester Applewhite apologised, saying the voluminous amount of information requested would have taken some time to prepare.
But member of the committee, Opposition MP Colm Imbert responded the EFCL was being asked to say what its tender rules were and if it had a fraud policy. “Those were not voluminous questions and they did not require voluminous answers,” Imbert added. “The EFCL has taken one year to confirm what its tender rules are, (and) whether they had a fraud policy. This is entirely unacceptable.” He said the other questions relating to contracts would require about three months to prepare.
“But to tell this committee whether you have tender rules, whether these tender rules were approved by anybody and whether you have a fraud policy, and to take a year to answer, that is ridiculous.” Imbert said he personally felt the EFCL was the most troublesome State enterprise to be examined by the PA(E)C. He said the bigger companies provided answers in two weeks but “this little company is taking a year to give us answers, some of which are unsatisfactory.”
Tertiary Education Minister Fazal Karim, another member of the committee agreed with Imbert. “Those accounts should have been here long before now, because they certainly were not voluminous,” Karim said.