By: Staff Writer
October 12, 2021
Despite the glittering reviews of Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley on the world stage for her forward thinking leadership, one accounting professional thinks that there is too much lagging on fraud and other policy related reforms as she laments the lack of traction legislative changes are not making.
Krystle Howell, internal auditor at Sagicor, Barbados speaking on a webinar for fraud prevention, hosted by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, said: “Our major problem right now is because of the political landscape that we’re in, we have majority government where the current administration have pretty much won all of the seats, which limits the amount of opposition that we have and the number of voices that would usually give pressure and incentivize for certain practices to be enforced and followed.”
These are the fears of massive landslides like the one that ushered in Barbados Labour Party headed by Mottley, who in 2018 won all of the seats up for grabs in the general election that year.
While Barbados is not the only country to have massive white-washed governmental change and for that matter, leading up to their 2018 election it was foreshadowed that Ms Mottley was the heir apparent to the country’s leadership, nonetheless it was expected that some of the policy changes and structural changes would have been forthcoming from such a dynamic leader.
“Currently we are not even at the foundation stage,” added Ms Howell complaining about the lack of progress being made on fraud protection in Barbados as she noted progress made in The Bahamas on Procurement legislation that came into effect in September and how these types of legislation she would “love” to have in place now in the country.
Ms Howell also said: “These are all things that we would love to have in place right now: integrity legislation; procurement act: and contractor general legislation.
“But we have not even reached that stage, to even say we have the foundation to start building other elements of political governance, so that we can move away from just having the legislation and move towards enforcement and ensuring that persons are adequately trained in what they’re supposed to do because we always assume persons know how to be ethical…”
Further blasting the Mottley administration for their “lack of enforcement” on fraud protection, Ms Howell added: “Because of the lack of opposition and especially since the pandemic has happened, there has been a diminishing voice in terms of enforcing and persuading the current administration that these things are important, and that they should be at the front burner. Integrity legislation is now almost four years overdue.
“We don’t have Whistleblower Protection and we recently would have heard from our minister of finance, that there are no longer implementing an Internal Audit Office, which was promised for September 2021.”
Caroyln Bell-Wisdom, Partner, Risk Assurance Services for PwC Jamaica, while highlighting strong “systems” as being important to managing fraud, added that systems is “not a state that you achieve by accident the board and other leaders of the organization have to be the ones who will set that frame and set that mechanism that will achieve the kind of culture that the organization wants, the kind of values that you want to have.”
The culture of the people working in an organisation matters as Ms Bell-Wisdom noted that you would notice two types of persons involved in a fraud culture in an organisation, the first people someone living above their means or on the other hand someone who “rationalises” the system for what it is. Both of these types are corrosive to an organisation and fraud examines must be on the lookout to weed them out at all cost.
Ms Bell-Wisdom added: “The last element that is there, and it’s a necessary element, is opportunity. This is what is within the organization that may facilitate, allow that fraud to take place and this is where most organizations have the greatest control over the situation.”
