MEMBERS of the Public Accounts Enterprises Committee of Parliament were left disturbed on Wednesday by the Community-Based Environmental Protection and Enhancement Programme's (CEPEP) failure to complete audits of $1.5 billion spent between 2015 and 2021.
This was blamed on the inability to retrieve documents from a private auditor after CEPEP's server crashed in 2015.
During an inquiry into CEPEP for the financial years 2009-2014, the committee's chairman, Wade Mark, along with several other members, advised CEPEP's board to take the auditor to court.
The documents belong to CEPEP and are the property of the Government. The committee felt the auditor acted unethically by refusing to hand over the documents.
Mark also criticised CEPEP for operating and spending without doing an audit. In his opening remarks he said, 'I think CEPEP has gone rogue…You have to spend close to $300 million or thereabouts in 2023, and you're telling this committee and the taxpayers of TT and the Parliament of TT that you have spent $1.5 billion, or close to that, and you are only in the process of auditing accounts for 2015-2021.
'I want to tell this CEPEP company that this is not satisfactory. It is not acceptable. And we'll have to take strong action.'
Mark also said it was 'fundamentally wrong' that the matter had not been reported to the police, no hard copies were stored - in keeping with statutory requirements - and after so many years, the 2015 audit is expected to start in 2023.
He called for a forensic audit into CEPEP's operations and the intervention of the Attorney General.
In CEPEP's defence, its CEO Keith Eddy told the committee the situation was not the company's fault.
CEPEP's data server went down just before the September 7, 2015 general election, and the company lost all its financial information.
A report on the server crash was submitted to the JSC after a previous sitting. CEPEP also reported the incident to the Finance Ministry, but not to the Fraud Squad.
Only after a new board was appointed in 2016 were attempts made to retrieve the lost data. It took tShree years to recreate the computerised financial system and source a new auditor.
CEPEP admitted it had no filing system of hard-copy documents stored to track the company's spending.
At Wednesday's sitting, several members of the JSC said they believed this was sabotage, because CEPEP's current board was also in the dark as to what had happened to the physical documents or why there was no filing system then.
The company's only option was to approach the previous auditor for documents to retrieve the lost data so that auditing for 2009-2014 could start. But that auditor refused to hand over the information to the new auditor.
CEPEP accessed its bank statements but was unable to provide other documents - such as receipts - to the auditors to detail how its funds were spent. Without the 2009-2014 data, the audit cannot go forward.
However, while it worked on a plan to retrieve the lost data, CEPEP was able to have all its manageme
