Some thoughts about the New York lawyers and the technology for distribution of the cash grant

WITH oil-driven economic growth, Guyana is attracting a lot of international business recognition. This past week we learned that this country is also attracting interest from legal practitioners from faraway places, in this case, no less a place than New York City. The prevailing law requires, among other things, that a practitioner be a citizen of a country that is a member of the Caribbean Council of Legal Education.

As such, the Guyana Bar Association is vehemently opposed to the NYC attorneys being admitted to the local Bar. My own opinion is that the rules should be amended to include Bar reciprocity, in that, if the rules of any country or city will allow Guyanese lawyers qualified to practise here, is also qualified to practise there, then they should be eligible to be admitted here. This will then put both the Bar Association and the Government of Guyana in a position to pursue agreements that can put Guyanese lawyers in courtrooms in far reaches of the world and acquire wide experience and knowledge.

Moving on to the issues surrounding the cash grant. I would like to call on my knowledge and training in information technology to offer an evaluation on the efficiency of the technology employed.

Based on my reading of the distribution procedure, I sincerely believe the President and his closest lieutenants: The Prime Minister, the Vice President and the Senior Finance Minister in the Office of the President, were misled, misadvised, and frankly, failed by the people in charge of technological development and deployment.

This commentary surrounds the choice of technology for implementing the cash transfer. The Vice President announced a few weeks ago that an App to aid the cash transfers is being developed. There is a major confusion surrounding the definition of an app. In computer science and software development, any programme designed to run on an Operating System (OS) is called an application (abbreviated App). Generally speaking, all non-OS programmes are Apps, whether designed for mobile devices or not. Though that is the general definition, the worldwide man-in-the-street, thinks of an app as a mobile software downloaded from one of the popular “app stores” or some other source that makes it available on their personal mobile device.

The technical people tasked with setting up this back-office technology for the cash grant must know of this distinction. It is their advice the Vice President relied upon to announce that an app is “coming soon,” conveying the impression that grant recipients can simply acquire an app on their personal device to do the registration.

Then it turned out that the app was designed for administrators to deploy field officers to physically complete the registration process. Here is where the government officials listed above were failed by their technocrats. First, technocrats ought to know that the wrong public impression was being created, they should’ve swiftly tendered a ‘code red’ advice to the policymakers to correct the public impression. These technocrats allowed this perception to brew for weeks, leaving the highest echelon unclothed, somewhat embarrassing.

What they created was a database app to capture the data with background programming to avoid duplicates and to minimise chances to ‘jook’ the system.

The app creators also failed the nation when they developed an app in 2024 (the age of AI) to be so labour intensive that it is causing inordinate delays in the distribution.

All they simply had to do was create an additional user interface linked to the said database and deployed it via a website where a typical recipient can create a unique username then fill out the form fields and upload relevant documents along with a clear real-time photo taken against a solid background. There should be predetermined cheque distribution centres in every region and the registrant is required to select the distribution centre closest to or most convenient to him/her. The cheques are printed and available at the preferred distribution centre within one week of registration. It is not until the registrant goes to receive the cheque in person that the labour-intensive administrators will verify the photo and original documents before issuing the cheque. As an additional layer of defence, each cheque could have a special crossing preventing, a third party from encashing it on behalf of others.

I will admit that there are other, more efficient ways to distribute the cash transfers. However, I suggest this method based on the fact that a registration process has already started with an existing database. My suggestion is simply to extend the front-end capture forms of the said back-end database to be put online so that citizens could self-register. Putting the forms online would quadruple the number of daily registrations. The physical registrations can still proceed in areas without adequate internet access, there can also be registrations at central village sites and internet cafes.

In short, it is not too late to make these adjustments or extension. It could be done within a matter of days and the government could be back in parliament by December 20 to appropriate more funds for distribution before year’s end.