GEORGETOWN Mayor, Ubraj Narine, has said that a personnel audit of all the departments at City Hall will need to be carried out to ensure that no corruption is taking place in this regard.

“We had a lot of issues with staffing, and I am calling for a personnel audit to be done in all of the departments at City Hall. It is a total mess. Up to now, we can’t get a right number of staff,” Narine told this publication in an interview.

Speaking on the sidelines of the City Council’s statutory meeting on Monday, Narine said this especially so in the Solid Waste Management Department, headed by Walter Narine. “Since I took office, we always getting bring and carry with sanitation workers. We always have issues with compactor operators; how they’re paid, what they’re doing.”

The mayor said the issues are not only about staffing, but have to do with the list of duties that a worker is expected to carry out. “You have the PR (public relations) taking home more money than the treasurer and so on in this place. All this nonsense needs to stop.”

During the statutory meeting, the mayor called out the Solid Waste Director for not doing enough. “The solid waste director is not doing enough. Mr. Narine, you need to do more.”
Just recently, senior officers could not provide a satisfactory explanation as to why the number of sanitation workers and street orderlies keep fluctuating each month.

Currently, the City Council could be paying out salaries to persons who do not work in the organisation. “The Human Resources Committee should deal with this issue seriously. There’s a cook-up going on here, but it doesn’t have salt,” the mayor had remarked.
It was Councillor Heston Bostwick who brought up the matter, comparing various monthly reports of the Solid Waste Management Department.

Last April’s report said the department had 10 street orderlies while another said three. While the April report showed 38 sanitation workers, another report said 47.
Fluctuations in the number of workers were also found to exist in the markets and Public Health Department, the Engineer’s Department and the Human Resources Department.
An audit has since been arranged to determine if the council is indeed in possession of all of the workers mentioned in the reports.

Councillor Oscar Clarke had pointed out that the Human Resource Department needs to have knowledge of who is being fired.

The mayor had noted that the situation is triangular, in that the Human Resources Department and the City Treasury’s Department also must have knowledge of who is being paid by the City Council.

Acting Town Clerk, Sharon Harry, had said that this is a very serious allegation. “If the report is being padded, it means that the payroll is also being padded,” she observed.