Gail Alexan­der

Se­nior Po­lit­i­cal Re­porter

Au­dits and in­ves­ti­ga­tions are on­go­ing in­to the Un­em­ploy­ment Re­lief Pro­gramme (URP), where 928 peo­ple were ter­mi­nat­ed.

St Au­gus­tine MP and Min­is­ter of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment, Khadi­jah Ameen, said some work­ers who lived out­side of T&T on­ly re­cent­ly re­turned to re­ceive their ter­mi­na­tion let­ters.

And Cou­va South MP and Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Bar­ry Padarath said some con­trac­tors of the Com­mu­ni­ty-Based En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion and En­hance­ment Pro­gramme (CEPEP) “sit among us” (in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives).

The in­for­ma­tion came in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives yes­ter­day as the min­is­ters re­spond­ed to ques­tions on URP and CEPEP from Op­po­si­tion MPs Ka­reem Mar­celle and Kei­th Scot­land.

Mar­celle asked Ameen to say how many work­ers at the URP have been sent home and/or ter­mi­nat­ed since April 29, this year.

Ameen said in the short time she had to an­swer the ques­tion, she could not list the in­ci­dence of “ra­dio talk show hosts who get paid un­der this pro­gramme and nev­er re­port to work, mem­bers of the Op­po­si­tion bench rel­a­tives who are list­ed, who nev­er re­port to work. What I can tell you is when we came in­to of­fice, we met 928 work­ers on pa­per.”

“With the num­ber of em­ploy­ees who nev­er re­port­ed to work, some of them who were liv­ing out­side of T&T, ter­mi­na­tion let­ters were is­sued for all 928 con­tract work­ers. Some of them, we could not even find them to give them a let­ter. Some of them on­ly turned up to re­ceive their let­ters,” she added.

She said there were al­so 130 pub­lic ser­vants who worked in the pro­gramme who have been ab­sorbed in­to the min­istry and as­signed to mu­nic­i­pal cor­po­ra­tions.

Mar­celle asked if the one-month pay­ment to URP work­ers had been paid to date. Ameen said, “Be­cause of the hun­dreds of mil­lions wast­ed un­der the pre­vi­ous Gov­ern­ment with the URP, I want to ad­vise that au­dits and in­ves­ti­ga­tions are be­ing con­duct­ed.

“It is stan­dard that when you have ter­mi­na­tion or the end of any con­tract, whether in pub­lic ser­vice or wher­ev­er, these are things that have to be au­dit­ed be­fore pay­ments are made. All the fi­nan­cial reg­u­la­tions and re­quire­ments will be ad­hered to by this law-abid­ing Gov­ern­ment.”

On the dead­line for the au­dit re­port, Ameen said, “Those things are not in the hands of the min­is­ter or any po­lit­i­cal per­son. This is a process of the pub­lic ser­vice. There is an au­di­tor’s de­part­ment, and they treat with it as they see nec­es­sary and they fol­low the rules. It is not in my hands.”

Padarath, re­ply­ing to Scot­land, said as of June 27, a to­tal of 336 CEPEP core con­trac­tors were ter­mi­nat­ed. “CEPEP does not em­ploy the work­ers, but the amount of ‘ghosts’ some CEPEP con­trac­tors were run­ning... MPs op­po­site might be quite fa­mil­iar with that.”

Padarath said rather than the work­ers, the PNM’s con­cern was re­al­ly the con­trac­tors, “Some of whom sit among us to­day!” he added.

He al­so claimed “plen­ty eat­ing” oc­curred in oth­er ar­eas un­der the PNM gov­ern­ment in­clud­ing the MTS (Na­tion­al Main­te­nance Train­ing and Se­cu­ri­ty Com­pa­ny Ltd).

“You would be sur­prised to know that down to the can­teens in the school, they were eat­ing plen­ty — re­al plen­ty — in MTS. And if they ask more ques­tions, I warn them, be care­ful of the an­swers!” Padarath added.