With Pan­el Kerr Fos­ter (PKF) Char­tered Ac­coun­tants and Busi­ness Ad­vi­sors in­sert­ing a dis­claimer in the Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion’s (UDe­COTT) au­dit­ed fi­nan­cial state­ment for 2018, Pub­lic Ac­counts (En­ter­pris­es) Com­mit­tee chair­man Wade Mark is warn­ing the State cor­po­ra­tion to put its house in or­der.

“For close to 28 years, found­ed in 1995, we are in 2023, and you are say­ing, Mr (Noel) Gar­cia, in go­ing for­ward, we in­tend to over­come these things. I wish Ude­cott luck, but I want to tell Ude­cott this is not on­ly luck. Put your house in or­der. We are warn­ing: put your house in or­der,” Mark said.

The com­mit­tee met for an en­quiry in­to the cor­po­ra­tion’s au­dit­ed ac­counts, bal­ance sheets and oth­er fi­nan­cial state­ments for 2017-2018 at  Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day. Mark said his un­der­stand­ing was that ex­ter­nal au­di­tors in­clud­ed a dis­claimer when they re­quest­ed but did not get in­for­ma­tion, or the Ude­cott was in such a chaot­ic state that it could not lo­cate the doc­u­ments.

The cor­po­ra­tion’s act­ing CEO, Bur­ton An­dre Hink­son, said PKF high­light­ed prop­er­ty, plant and equip­ment val­u­a­tions and the cor­po­ra­tion’s in­abil­i­ty to state the re­im­bursable Val­ued-Added Tax (VAT) fig­ure and con­tributed cap­i­tal. Hink­son said these were pre­vail­ing rea­sons from 2016-2018 why there were dis­claimers.

Mark ques­tioned if in­com­pe­tence or re­source con­straints were re­spon­si­ble for Ude­cott’s in­abil­i­ty to pro­vide PKF with the in­for­ma­tion. Hink­son said con­struc­tion of the prop­er­ties spanned many years, and some is­sues arose dur­ing the UFF Com­mis­sion of En­quiry in­to the Con­struc­tion Sec­tor, where doc­u­men­ta­tion was tak­en from Ude­cott.

“A lot of that doc­u­men­ta­tion is what is need­ed to go in­to pro­vid­ing the sup­port for the con­struc­tion in progress. While we have cleaned it up and con­tin­ue to make work, they are some of the long­stand­ing projects that  have af­fect­ed this sched­ule.

“You will re­mem­ber those are some of the larg­er ones, so for a pe­ri­od of time in the ear­li­er years, we may not have been able to sub­stan­ti­ate all of the pa­per­work the au­di­tors would have re­quest­ed. But, in our lat­ter projects, that is not the case,” Hink­son said.