A SPECIAL investigation has been launched into the purchase of 100,000 birth certificates by the Ministry of the Presidency (now Office of the President), according to the 2021 Auditor-General (AG)’s report, which was released last week.

According to Registrar General of the General Register Office (GRO) Raymond Cummings, the birth certificates were purchased for the sum of $288.098 million, under the A Partnership for National Unity + Alliance for Change (APNU+AFC) coalition government.

He explained to this publication that in or around 2013 or 2014, the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) decided to increase the security of the certificate. As such, the implementation of a programme sponsored by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) to digitise the records of the GRO began.

It was explained that when the APNU+AFC took office in 2015, they bought certificates on paper which were copied, instead of continuing the programme.

According to Cummings, this was not a secure certificate, because if someone were to have a blank one, all they needed to do was fill in the information.

“Those certificates were purchased sometime between 2017 and 2019,” he noted.

Cummings related when the PPP/C took office in 2020 and he became Registrar General, they started printing all certificates through the Guyana National Printers Limited.

Cummings said that the cost is being reduced, by far, as they have not yet spent that amount of money to print certificates. The 2022 budget for the printing of all certificates is $30 million.

“Our print budget does not even reach $30 million, and that includes all the printing that we have to do. For 2022, the printing budget was $30 million, and that does not include only birth certificates,” he said.

It includes birth, death, and marriage certificates, registration forms, application forms, discharge cards, and more.

Included in the $288 million spent by the APNU+AFC, were amounts amounting to $18.599 million, which represented full payments on two contracts for the acquisition of 100,000 birth certificates.

“The contracts were awarded by NPTAB, through the single-source method of procurement. The Ministry, in its request to NPTAB to utilise the single-source method of procurement stated that blank birth certificates are printed with highly sensitive security features which are confidential,” the AG report stated.

The Ministry also stated that the incumbent supplier and its “sister company” had successfully delivered on previous contracts, and have proven to be reliable and confidential, and provided “high-quality security-features enable blank certificates”.

At the time of reporting, a special investigation was being conducted into the said acquisition of birth certificates.