FPAC inquiry into Electoral Commission reveals discrepancies |26 May 2018

A lacklustre internal communication system, two bank accounts that had evaded the knowledge of the commissioners and several formatted hard drives were some of the spectacular details which arose during the Finance and Public Accounts Committee’s exchange with the Electoral Commission.

The interrogation, which was conducted yesterday in conjecture with several others, saw the appearance of the former chair and chief executive of the Electoral Commission, Hendrick Gappy.

Mr Gappy’s presence was explained by the fact that the FPAC meeting was being conducted in relations to the Auditor General’s 2016 report and he had been the head of the commission since 1999 until his resignation in January 2018.

Also by his side were acting chairperson Bernard Elizabeth and electoral commissioners Marie-Therese Purvis, Luciana Lagrenade and Veronique Bonnelame-Alcindor.

It was the revelation of the existence of two Nouvobanq bank accounts -- one for the purpose of recurrent expenditures and the other for execution of elections --which revealed fragments within the Electoral Commission, particularly between the existing commissioners and the former chairman.

The audit report’s point of concern in regards to the accounts was that the accounts had no dual signatories as should be the case under Section 11.5 (c) (i) of the Accounting Manual which requires that cheques be signed by two signatories. In this case however it is solely the chairman of the Electoral Commission who is authorised to sign the cheques.

All of the electoral commissioners stated that they had had no prior substantial knowledge of the accounts before the publication of the Auditor General’s report.

“As a member who has been serving in the commission for a long time now, I can state that the commission did not know of any such accounts until the auditor’s report,” Mrs Purvis told FPAC members.

“We have asked, on several occasions, how the payments are conducted but we were always told that it was done through the Ministry of Finance.”

On his part Mr Gappy explained that the accounts, with the account names ‘Electoral Commission’ and ‘Electoral Commissioner’, were funded by money received from the Ministry of Finance and further added that he had inherited them from his predecessors.

He asserted that it was “very strange” that the electoral commissioners had only recently learnt about these accounts and that, since 2017, the accounts have been reconciled and are up to par to financial regulations.

“The accounts operated as a cash flow, and once this cash flow ended we asked the Ministry of Finance for more in order to deal with small expenditures. It was the Ministry of Finance who made payments in regards to the big expenditures such as foreign exchange,” Mr Gappy explained.

The deficiency in internal communications within the commission was further highlighted through Mr Gappy’s acknowledgement that there were payments made through the accounts that were never brought to the attention of the other commissioners.

“In regards to if the Electoral Commission has been audited before, I can confirm that the commission was audited five times. This was in 1996, 1999, 2001, 2008 and 2016,” the Auditor General, Gamini Herath, clarified.

According to Mr Herath the anomaly in regards to the bank accounts were brought to the attention of the commission in all five instances through management letters addressed to the chairperson.

Mrs Bonnelame-Alcindor was quick to point out that the other commissioners had not been provided access to such a letter, even when they had asked for it from Mr Gappy or demanded a copy from the office of the Auditor General.

Tension heightened when Mrs Bonnelame-Alcindor stated that the Electoral Commissioner currently has no digital memory of past elections and standards of procedures since the computers’ hard drives had been wiped clean.

Mr Gappy responded by stating that all information had been on the servers when he had made the handover and the computers had been formatted after he had resigned.

The FPAC is expected to recommend that the Auditor General conducts a further analysis into the Electoral Commission’s account.