Anatomy of failure - Former UHWI chairman says recommendations for correction not followed by management

Wayne Chai Chong said the University Hospital of the West Indies (UHWI) board he led for about a year from December 2022 had identified corrective steps for a litany of problems later flagged by the Auditor General’s Department (AuGD) in a performance audit. However, he said very little was done by the management to implement the recommendations.

Chong, who appeared before Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on Tuesday, highlighted some of the weaknesses and challenges that plagued the hospital at the time.

He said the institution operated at a significant deficit and had fallen behind in its payment of employee and employer statutory deductions. Further, operational and financial procedures and controls were not being observed consistently and the Government’s guidelines for procurement were not always followed.

In addition, the former chairman said planning and budgeting skills were weak and the departments responsible for these activities were under-resourced and staff morale was generally low. In this regard, he said the board decided that the UHWI needed a leader who could change the course of the institution.

Chong said the board had other concerns during his one-year tenure as chairman, including the lack of approved strategic or operational plans and budgets excluded the cost of acquisition of some major capital items.

Other discoveries that caused the board concern included no approved procurement plan being made available to the board for review and insufficient inventory data to support procurement requests being sent to the Procurement Committee.

He said many contracts for works were issued as emergency procurement, contract splintering was practised, and there was a lack of clarity in University of the West Indies-UHWI contractual relationship in a number of areas.  

Further, Chong said the board had concerns that there were compliance issues with the Government of Jamaica and Ministry of Finance procurement procedures. The board subsequently authorised the contracting of an external independent audit of the procurement process as the third special audit.

Chong said the issues flagged in the auditor general’s report, where there was abuse of UHWI’s tax-exempt status, took place after his board was dissolved.

Chong said his board had detected several internal control weaknesses, which had resulted in financial loss to the institution with “ghost employees” accounts (persons not employed to UHWI) being discovered and human resource numbers not correlating with those in the finance department.

He said arrests were made and litigation initiated to recover some of the funds.

Current acting CEO Eric Hosin told the committee that the hospital recovered $2 million that was paid to three ghost employees.

edmond.campbell@gleanerjm.com