A move to make the Golden Age Home in St Andrew an arm of the Local Government Ministry, based on an International Monetary Fund (IMF) recommendation five years ago, has hit a major snag.
The problem is that the home is a private company built in 1985 with an independent board of directors which has, over the years, been perceived as a government entity based on the fact that it is heavily subsidised by the State.
The Home is simply a private institution that receives full funding via donation from the Government to offer a service on behalf of the Government that the Government was not able to provide or better put, chose not to get involved in because they wanted it free of political interference,” Matthew Smith-Barrett, chair of the home's Finance and Resource Mobilisation Committee, told the Jamaica Observer.
“What the home has been doing over its life is that, instead of recreating the wheel in terms of operations and governance, it adopted government best practices, government salary scales and government positions for its operations,” Smith-Barrett, who also sits on the Golden Age Home's Governance Committee, explained further.
The Public Enterprise Division of the Ministry of Finance has the Golden Age Home listed as a public body, because over all these years the information has been passed down and everybody came to believe that because we were giving you this money you must be a government entity.
