Richard Lord

The In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion is mov­ing in the new year to avert cor­rup­tion in T&T.Chair­man of the In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion Ken­neth Gor­don an­nounced the new ini­tia­tive dur­ing his first of­fi­cial news con­fer­ence since as­sum­ing of­fice on No­vem­ber 1. The brief­ing was held at the com­mis­sion's of­fice, Unit Trust Cor­po­ra­tion Build­ing, In­de­pen­dence Square, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day.Gor­don said: "In Jan­u­ary 2012, we hope to com­mence a pro­gramme to sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly ex­am­ine statu­to­ry bod­ies and State en­ter­pris­es in or­der to de­ter­mine whether there ex­ist sat­is­fac­to­ry poli­cies and pro­ce­dures to en­sure cor­rup­tion will be pre­vent­ed and de­tect­ed and the pub­lic funds utilised ef­fi­cient­ly."

He said if the ini­tia­tive was suc­cess­ful­ly im­ple­ment­ed next year "we would find our­selves in a po­si­tion where we would per­haps avert a num­ber of things that have been hap­pen­ing."He said there was a pro­vi­sion un­der the In­tegri­ty in Pub­lic Act Life Act for the com­mis­sion "to mon­i­tor State en­ter­pris­es to en­sure they are op­er­at­ing ef­fi­cient­ly."He stressed that was one of the crit­i­cal ini­tia­tives to be ad­dressed next year.

Gor­don said that was even more crit­i­cal, "par­tic­u­lar­ly at this time when as you know we had an un­for­tu­nate read­ing in the cor­rup­tion per­cep­tion in­dex and we must do every­thing pos­si­ble to cor­rect that."He al­so said the time had come for the com­mis­sion to for­mu­late a more cost ef­fec­tive mech­a­nism for the fil­ing of de­c­la­ra­tions by pub­lic of­fi­cials, as re­quired by law.He said the cur­rent mech­a­nism was not cost ef­fec­tive.

"Our ob­ject now is to make this a lot more cost ef­fec­tive," Gor­don added.He said work was ad­vanced with the new de­c­la­ra­tion form, which has to be ap­proved be­fore it could be im­ple­ment­ed.He said the pro­posed sys­tem would al­low for all the de­tails to be sub­mit­ted in the first year of fil­ing but in sub­se­quent years on­ly new in­for­ma­tion would be re­quired to be filed."Our hope is that we can speed­i­ly get the re­quired ap­provals to change not the in­for­ma­tion that is held but the fre­quen­cy in which that in­for­ma­tion is re­peat­ed," Gor­don said.

He al­so spoke of the need to com­plete the reg­u­la­tions for the Act. He said that mat­ter al­so would be ad­dressed in the new year.Gor­don said about 38 com­plaints filed at the com­mis­sion were ex­pect­ed to re­main un­re­solved by the end of the year.De­scrib­ing it as "bad news", Gor­don said there was a back­log of 3,000 de­c­la­ra­tions in T&T.He said, based on his ob­ser­va­tions, there was no need for in­creased fi­nan­cial and oth­er re­sources to run the com­mis­sion.