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Sunday, July 27, 2025

Garcia: Ministry’s late payment unacceptable

by

Akash Samaroo
2403 days ago
20181227
Anthony Garcia

Anthony Garcia

Shirley Bahadur

Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter An­tho­ny Gar­cia has re­quest­ed a meet­ing with his Fi­nance and Ac­counts de­part­ment af­ter he de­scribed the min­istry’s habit of late pay­ments to con­trac­tors, schools, and stu­dents as ‘un­ac­cept­able.’

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Gar­cia ad­mit­ted that sev­er­al of the is­sues he’s had to face in 2018 was due to fund­ing.

Gar­cia said there are too many in­stances where there is a de­lay in re­ceiv­ing and pro­cess­ing in­voic­es be­fore they go to the Min­istry of Fi­nance for ap­proval.

“To me, the ex­cuse of wait­ing on the Min­istry of Fi­nance is of­ten prof­fered, we have to put our house in or­der first,” the min­is­ter said dur­ing an in­ter­view at his min­istry’s head­quar­ters on St Vin­cent Street, Port- of- Spain.

Us­ing the ex­am­ple of pay­ments to school maxi taxi dri­vers to high­light the bro­ken sys­tem, Gar­cia said, “We have a prob­lem where each one blames the oth­er, we have some con­cerns with PTSC, I can tell you we on­ly re­ceived the in­voic­es from PTSC for Sep­tem­ber pay­ments on the 19th of De­cem­ber and that is to­tal­ly un­ac­cept­able.”

Gar­cia did not want to blame the de­lays sole­ly on pa­per­work. He said they’ve al­so been giv­en a man­date from the Min­istry of Fi­nance to go through the in­voic­es with a fine tooth comb.

With re­gard to out­stand­ing pay­ments for con­trac­tors in the school re­pair pro­gramme, the min­is­ter said he has been in con­tact with the Min­istry of Fi­nance, Plan­ning and the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al and he has been giv­en the as­sur­ance that most con­trac­tors can be paid be­fore the end of this year.

He said, “That will give us the op­por­tu­ni­ty to be able to start or restart con­struc­tion at some schools, we have iden­ti­fied 22 schools which we con­sid­er as pri­or­i­ty schools and we are hop­ing that very ear­ly in the New Year con­struc­tion can re­sume.”


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