LOCAL GOVT. MINISTER CHARGES ADMINISTRATIVE HEADS OF LOCAL AUTHORITIES TO STEP UP THEIR COMPLIANCE GAME AS PART OF THEIR PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT OBJECTIVES
As part of a special initiative to optimize financial reporting compliance and general service delivery by the island’s local authorities, Minister of Local Government and Community Development, Hon. Desmond McKenzie, recently convened a special meeting of the Chief Executive Officers and Chief Financial Officers of all fourteen Municipal Corporations. This meeting also came against the background of the 2025/26 Report to Parliament by the Office of the Auditor General, which raised issues including the late submission of annual financial statements, the status of the Municipal Corporations’ disaster preparedness and response mechanisms, as well as Human Resource matters concerning the complement of personnel in the Municipal Corporations.
In his initial address, Minister McKenzie suggested that the Municipal Corporations should thoroughly assess all the issues resulting from Hurricane Melissa, and implement more resilient measures to manage the Corporations’ finances going forward. He further called on the local authorities to implement a formal system that will assist them to capitalize on their various streams of fee income, also known as Own Source Revenue.
“[You] have a stream of revenues that you have at your disposal…there are no measures that are put in place to collect the millions of building fees and the other fees that are out there…” he said.
In raising the matter of the 95 outstanding financial statements outlined in the Auditor-General’s Report and the reasons for the Municipal Corporations’ repeated delay in producing the statements, Chief Executive Officer of the St. Ann Municipal Corporation, Ms. Jennifer Brown-Cunningham explained that each local authority has established a plan of action to complete the outstanding statements over a prescribed period.
“ When we went to Parliament in January of last year [2025] there were a number of things that we indicated would be required for us to meet our obligations… St. Ann has 15 statements outstanding and we would have put forward a timeframe within which to clear that backlog, and that would be the same for all the municipalities with outstanding statements, a timeframe within which we would expect to have those statements up-to-date” she said.
Ms. Brown-Cunningham further went on to explain that similar to some of the other Municipal Corporations, St. Ann hired an independent contractor to complete the outstanding statements in the stipulated timeframe.
Minister McKenzie, along with the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry, Mrs. Marsha Henry-Martin, encouraged the executives to remain mindful of the systems of accountability that are in place to safeguard the integrity of local government, and added that these systems should never be compromised, even in the pursuit of speedy and efficient service delivery. He used the opportunity to once again call for the use of the AMANDA Software that was implemented by the local authorities some time ago to streamline, digitize and track building permits as part of the Development Approvals process.