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Monday, July 7, 2025

Government to audit food card holders

by

20160622

So­cial De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Cher­rie-Ann Critchlow-Cock­burn said in­ter­nal au­di­tors have been asked to do an ex­ten­sive au­dit of every one of the 240,000-plus re­cip­i­ents who re­ceive food cards to en­sure that they are el­i­gi­ble to be re­cip­i­ents.

The min­is­ter said they had un­der­tak­en the au­dit of every one of the files be­cause they recog­nised dur­ing the en­rol­ment process that a re­view was not done on all process­es.

Critchlow-Cock­burn re­ferred to the tight­en­ing of the dis­tri­b­u­tion of food cards un­der the new Peo­ple Na­tion­al Move­ment's (PNM) ad­min­is­tra­tion which had seen the re­moval of some 4,000 card­hold­ers who were not el­i­gi­ble for the ser­vice. She said the re­moval of the 4,000 had saved gov­ern­ment $25 mil­lion on an an­nu­al ba­sis.

Ad­ver­tise­ments she said were placed in the main stream me­dia for card­hold­ers to be en­rolled to en­sure those who were el­i­gi­ble could use the card to make their month­ly pur­chase at su­per­mar­kets.

She said on Ju­ly 15, the three-month ex­ten­sion for some 14,000 peo­ple who had not come in to be en­rolled in the sys­tem would have ex­pired and they would ul­ti­mate­ly be re­moved.

The re­moval of that ad­di­tion­al 14,000 peo­ple from the sys­tem, she said, would save the Gov­ern­ment and ad­di­tion­al $110 mil­lion an­nu­al­ly. She said cur­rent­ly they had 240,000-plus peo­ple who re­ceived pay­ment.

Critchlow-Cock­burn said at least 24.5 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion in T&T was liv­ing in pover­ty in spite of suc­ces­sive gov­ern­ments ex­pend­ing bil­lions of dol­lars on so­cial sec­tor pro­grammes.She said one of the rea­sons for that had to do with ed­u­ca­tion.

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley said the ed­u­ca­tion re­form Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion An­tho­ny Gar­cia had un­der­tak­en would seek to break the cy­cle of chil­dren just pass­ing through the sys­tem with­out ben­e­fit­ting from a prop­er ed­u­ca­tion.

Speak­ing at a PNM po­lit­i­cal meet­ing in San Fer­nan­do on Tues­day night, Critchlow-Cock­burn spoke of a num­ber of ini­tia­tives to as­sist the "poor and in­di­gent," among them ac­cess to a num­ber of grants as well as food cards.

While she spoke, a lone fe­male pro­tes­tor stood qui­et­ly at the back of the au­di­to­ri­um hold­ing aloft a plac­ard high­light­ing her plight for her just dues.

"URP work­ers on the bread­line. We need to feed our chil­dren. Get rid of those pa­per crim­i­nals in URP. We want our mon­ey for the past month. That is wicked­ness."She was ig­nored by the PNM hi­er­ar­chy.


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