The Auditor General has reported that the National Housing Trust failed to realise any return on three major projects over the past five to ten years, projects that together cost taxpayers and contributors more than $2 billion, according to Gleaner reporting on the findings.
The report lands against a backdrop of a Trust that only about 30 percent of contributors ever actually draw a housing benefit from, funded through mandatory payroll deductions that function like a tax for the majority. For contributors whose deductions have gone toward projects the Auditor General says delivered nothing, the finding sharpens a familiar question: who does the NHT’s spending actually serve when the money does not directly reach the contributors it is collected from?
None of the three projects has been publicly resolved in the months since the report, and the pattern is not isolated. Separate Gleaner reporting the same year documented a $62.5 million NHT land purchase from a company tied to a sitting government minister that has sat unused, and attracted squatters, for more than a decade.
Two billion dollars is a genuinely large sum to write off with no explanation more satisfying than a project failed, particularly for an institution whose entire funding model depends on ordinary workers trusting that their compulsory contribution is actually being put to use. Accountability for specific decisions, not just an aggregate loss figure in an audit report, is what would actually answer the question contributors are left asking.
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