29 June 2020 saw a new era dawn in Anguilla’s political history. The Anguilla Progressive Movement under the leadership of Dr Ellis Lorenzo Webster took the reins of government. As a result, the Anguilla Tourist Board is under new management. It desperately needs it.
The latest published Chief Auditor’s Report on Anguilla Tourist Board (ie, for 2017 http://www.gov.ai/documents/hoa/ATB%202017%20Final%20Audited%20FS%20including%20signed%20CA%20report.pdf) is devastating. It reveals an extreme degree of incompetence and negligence in failing to follow the requirements of the Tourist Board Act. The new government must never allow this to be repeated.
The ATB must:
• Ensure its estimates of revenue and expenditure are approved by the Minister of Finance, as well as the House of Assembly, as required by the Act, before a penny is spent.
• Put in place written procurement policies for entering into contractual agreements and appointing agents to represent the Board, as required by the Act.
• Ensure it receives reports on the various overseas marketing representatives’ performance during the year, before renewing their contracts.
• Make sure it reviews, as stipulated in the contracts, each marketing representative on the status of their marketing activities.
• Ensure the auditor can corroborate the expenses recorded to the planned initiatives of each of the representatives.
• Put in place written policies on international travel and subsistence so that the auditor receives approved budgets for each international travel to make sure expenses incurred were valid and within approved limits.
• Make and follow written policies for purchase of supplies, furniture and equipment used in trade shows and exhibits and account properly for monitoring and future usage.
• Put in place policies for sub-contracted services made by overseas representatives as required by section 24 of the Act, so that never again can the situation arise where the Portfolio Management Group in the USA contracted Live Communication, Cision, and PR Newswire, while the UK representative contracted White Tiger for its public relations activities, without approved contractual arrangements.
• Ensure that never again will a situation arise where the Portfolio Management Group was appointed to be the Board’s marketing representative for the USA and Canada without guidelines on how the budget of $1,745,000 would be spent, nor any review or assessment of the key performance indicators, and without the stipulated pre-approval by the Board of administrative expenses of US$1,000 or more.
Never again must the ATB be run as if it were a private family business. This is public money and public business. The highest standards of probity and responsibility are the minimum we expect.
https://donmitchellcbeqc.blogspot.com/2021/06/anguilla-tourist-board-disaster.html
