At­tor­ney-at-law and chair­man of the To­ba­go Busi­ness Cham­ber Mar­tin George con­demns the on­go­ing de­ba­cle where the To­ba­go Reg­is­trar Gen­er­al’s of­fice has been locked out of ac­cess to the reg­is­trar gen­er­al’s de­part­ment com­put­er, sys­tem and data­base.

He told Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day that some­thing seemed to be amiss and called on the Gov­ern­ment to have ser­vices to To­ba­go re­stored by the end of this week.

“It is re­al­ly a sit­u­a­tion that needs im­me­di­ate at­ten­tion and rec­ti­fi­ca­tion and if it is that there has to be some in­ves­ti­ga­tions that lead to charges of mis­be­hav­iour in pub­lic of­fice, then we say let the chips fall where they may but deal with this ex­pe­di­tious­ly,” he said.

“It is clear that some­thing is ter­ri­bly amiss here. It can­not be that some­one in the up­per hi­er­ar­chy of the Reg­is­trar Gen­er­al’s of­fice in Trinidad can take a uni­lat­er­al de­ci­sion to lock out all of To­ba­go from ac­cess to the Reg­is­trar Gen­er­al’s data­base and com­put­er sys­tems. This means that sim­ple things such as a birth cer­tifi­cate, a death cer­tifi­cate, these are things you will not be able to get. Reg­is­ter­ing a deed, you know, get­ting cer­ti­fied copies of a deed. All of these things are un­avail­able to To­bag­o­ni­ans and it is cer­tain­ly a very un­ten­able sit­u­a­tion. In fact, quite frankly, one is sur­prised that the Prime Min­is­ter and At­tor­ney Gen­er­al are not ap­palled at this turn of af­fairs,” George added.

He not­ed that there are es­tab­lished pro­ce­dures and poli­cies with­in both the Pub­lic Ser­vice Act and the ju­di­cial and le­gal ser­vices reg­u­la­tions for han­dling these types of sit­u­a­tions, which should have been used in­stead of uni­lat­er­al­ly lock­ing out To­ba­go from cru­cial ser­vices.