Gail Alexan­der

Se­nior Po­lit­i­cal Re­porter

So­cial De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Don­na Cox told the Sen­ate on Tues­day night about the num­ber of is­sues plagu­ing her min­istry which could be ad­dressed once the Whistle­blow­er Pro­tec­tion Bill be­comes law.

Be­fore the bill was passed in the Up­per House, Cox said there were ar­eas of in­ves­ti­ga­tion by the min­istry and TTPS that now re­quire whistle­blow­ers to come for­ward re­gard­ing fraud­u­lent ap­pli­ca­tions, mis­al­lo­ca­tion of funds, con­flict of in­ter­est in award­ing grants, bribery, dis­crim­i­na­tion, nepo­tism—and where some su­per­mar­kets still give Food Card hold­ers al­co­hol and cig­a­rettes.

“We know of cas­es at par­tic­u­lar lo­cal boards where grant mon­ey has been di­vert­ed for per­son­al use or unau­tho­rised pur­pos­es, cashed or re­deemed at par­tic­u­lar gro­ceries. Since these aren’t iso­lat­ed to one in­di­vid­ual, whistle­blow­ers need to come for­ward to let us know who’s run­ning this scheme,” Cox said.

De­bate on the bill be­gan around 8.15 pm Tues­day af­ter the Poly­graph Bill—The Mis­cel­la­neous Pro­vi­sions (Test­ing and Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion) Bill, 2022 was passed with unan­i­mous sup­port. The de­bate end­ed at mid­night and re­sumed yes­ter­day.

Cox said some of the fraud dis­cov­ered at the min­istry—peo­ple with two Food Cards or peo­ple liv­ing in the US and col­lect­ing se­nior cit­i­zens’ pen­sions—is owed great­ly to civic-mind­ed cit­i­zens who un­der­stand that these sit­u­a­tions de­prive oth­ers.

Cox said the anonymi­ty the leg­is­la­tion af­fords is no dif­fer­ent from the pro­tec­tion of­fered by the Crime Stop­pers hot­line.

“I’m cer­tain there are mem­bers on (Gov­ern­ment’s) side, who can speak of cor­rup­tion that’s been brought to their at­ten­tion in their min­istries. Some of these go with­out res­o­lu­tion be­cause wit­ness­es are ei­ther un­will­ing or afraid to come for­ward,” she said.

Cox said the leg­is­la­tion ap­plies retroac­tive­ly to past mis­con­duct, en­sur­ing all in­stances of fraud and cor­rup­tion are ad­dressed re­gard­less of when they oc­curred.

She al­so salut­ed Cu­mu­to/Man­zanil­la MP Dr Rai Rag­bir for sup­port­ing the bill in the Low­er House when he broke ranks with the Op­po­si­tion UNC and vot­ed with the Gov­ern­ment, al­low­ing it to be passed.