Ot­to Car­ring­ton

Mem­bers of the Pub­lic Ser­vices As­so­ci­a­tion (PSA) yes­ter­day re­port­ed to the Fraud Squad, their con­cerns about the find­ings of fi­nan­cial in­con­sis­ten­cies with­in the union fol­low­ing a re­cent­ly-done au­dit.

The au­dit, or­dered by the High Court in Jan­u­ary 2020, found over­spend­ing that ex­ceed­ed the PSA’s in­come by $6.3 mil­lion in the last four years, ques­tion­able pro­cure­ment prac­tices, and a pen­sion plan in lim­bo.

It al­so flagged an un­usu­al­ly high fre­quen­cy of re­im­burse­ments to PSA pres­i­dent Wat­son Duke.

The au­dit of the years 2014 and 2015 was done by char­tered ac­coun­tants E Au­gus­tus Alexan­der and Com­pa­ny.

“We would have looked at this re­port and stud­ied the re­port and this re­port has in­deed con­firmed our fears, this has been a long bat­tle and this bat­tle had start­ed in 2010 when I spoke out about the mis­ap­pro­pri­a­tion of funds in the union. This re­port takes this fi­nan­cial sit­u­a­tion the union finds it­self in on to a dif­fer­ent lev­el,” for­mer gen­er­al sec­re­tary, Oral Saun­ders said.

He added that the union has not had an an­nu­al con­fer­ence for some time and that this body over­sees the union af­fairs and the bud­get of the union.

“It states in the con­sti­tu­tion that the Pres­i­dent is the Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer and Ad­min­is­tra­tive Of­fi­cer and there­fore he is re­spon­si­ble for all the day to day trans­ac­tions at the PSA and the con­sti­tu­tion reads that all cheques must be signed by the Pres­i­dent and this au­dit tells us about $6.3 mil­lion of the PSA funds leav­ing the in­sti­tu­tion with­out prop­er cheques and bal­ances,” Saun­ders said.

Hel de­nied that this ac­tion has any­thing to do with PSA pres­i­dent Wat­son Duke be­ing a can­di­date at the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly elec­tions card­ed for De­cem­ber 6.

“I want to dis­pel that be­cause what­ev­er tran­spires as the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly elec­tions has no bear­ing on the PSA. This au­dit re­port is dat­ed Au­gust 4, 2020, and ide­al­ly, this re­port should have been laid at the PSA Gen­er­al Coun­cil meet­ing and this was not done so it is not our fault that some­one would have dropped this off in my mail­box. It is nec­es­sary now for us to hand it over to the right au­thor­i­ty re­gard­less of what hap­pens at the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly elec­tions and we are ab­solute that the PSA pres­i­dent and his ex­ec­u­tive must ac­count,” he added.

Duke was un­avail­able for a re­sponse as calls to his mo­bile phone went unan­swered.

The PSA has more than 80,000 mem­bers from more than 100 or­gan­i­sa­tions and around $26 mil­lion in re­port­ed as­sets.

Duke has been the PSA pres­i­dent since 2008.