Caribbean Maritime Institute Doubled Its Student Numbers While Its Core Mission Collapsed and $326 Million in Fees Went Uncollected

A government audit of the Caribbean Maritime Institute covering five years of operations found an institution that expanded aggressively without a plan, lost control of its revenue, and quietly drifted away from the seafaring mandate that justifies its existence. For Jamaican taxpayers who subsidise CMI and for the maritime sector that depends on it, the findings raise urgent questions about what this institution is actually for — and who is watching over it.

When the Auditor General’s Department completed its activity-based audit of the Caribbean Maritime Institute in late 2015, the picture that emerged was not of an institution in outright collapse, but something in some respects more troubling — an institution growing rapidly in the wrong direction. CMI was taking in more students than ever before, spending money without the approvals it needed, failing to collect fees on a massive scale, and watching its foundational purpose — training the next generation of Jamaican seafarers — quietly unravel. The audit covered April 2010 to March 2015, a period during which the institution’s problems compounded steadily while governance structures remained weak and management responses remained partial at best.

CMI was established in 1980 as a joint Jamaica-Norway project. It operates three schools — Marine and Professional Studies, Academic Studies, and Advanced Skills — and is mandated by statute to develop maritime education and training. That mandate places it at the intersection of Jamaica’s economic development ambitions and its relationship with the sea, a relationship that has historically been central to the island’s identity and livelihood. The audit found that this mandate was being honoured more in name than in practice.

Student enrolment at CMI rose 105 percent between 2010-11 and 2014-15, climbing from 1,090 to 2,236 students. On the surface, those numbers might suggest institutional success. But the Auditor General found that CMI conducted no resource audit before or during this expansion — no assessment of whether the institution had the physical space, the qualified teaching staff, or the administrative infrastructure to absorb a doubling of its student body. The consequences were predictable and documented. CMI rented three additional classroom spaces at a cost of $5.54 million over three years. Class sizes ballooned to between 38 and 48 students — a range that more than doubles the maximum of 24 recommended by the International Maritime Organization for maritime training. Student surveys captured in the audit reflected dissatisfaction with the quality of lecturer delivery. The institution was growing, but it was doing so in a way that degraded the experience of the very students it was meant to serve.

Staffing decisions made during this period compounded the problem. To manage the surge in student numbers, CMI engaged 253 part-time adjunct lecturers. The total cost of those engagements over three years came to $135.6 million. The difficulty is that CMI made these engagements without obtaining the approval of the Ministry of Finance — approval that government policy required. Beyond the procedural breach, the audit also found that six assistant lecturers did not meet the minimum requirement of three years of post-qualification teaching experience. For an institution producing graduates who will work on vessels at sea, in environments where competence is a matter of safety, the standards applied to who teaches those graduates carry real weight.

The revenue picture was equally troubling. CMI had set itself a target of generating 90 percent of its income from tuition fees, with government subvention accounting for no more than 10 percent. Over the audit period, tuition revenue reached only 77 percent of total income, with subvention still covering 23 percent. That gap matters to every Jamaican taxpayer. It means that public funds were being used at a higher rate than planned to sustain an institution that was simultaneously failing to collect what was owed to it by students.

The scale of uncollected fees is striking. As of March 2015, 3,102 students owed CMI a combined $326.4 million in outstanding tuition. Of that total, $151.9 million had been outstanding for more than a year. The Auditor General estimated that approximately 41 percent of the total receivables were unlikely ever to be recovered. That represents roughly $134 million in fees that CMI enrolled students, delivered services to, and will not be paid for — a sum that would fund substantial improvements to facilities, staffing, or scholarship provision if it had been collected as earned. The audit found that CMI had no formal receivables policy during this period — no structured framework governing how fees were to be tracked, chased, or written off. The institution was operating one of its most critical financial functions on an ad hoc basis.

Against this backdrop of financial disorder, the decline of CMI’s core marine education programme stands out as perhaps the most consequential finding. Enrolment in the School of Marine and Professional Studies — the school that most directly reflects CMI’s statutory mandate — fell 36 percent over the audit period, from 215 to 138 students. The Auditor General found no evidence of strategic initiatives to address or reverse this decline. The cadet programme, which trains students for careers at sea, had 438 registered students, but 152 of them — 38 percent — never completed the seafarer experience that the programme requires. The average graduation rate across the institution stood at just 25 percent, against a projected target of 86 percent.

Jamaica’s maritime sector supports thousands of jobs and is deeply embedded in the national economy, from shipping and logistics to fisheries and tourism. The professional pipeline that CMI is meant to sustain is not an abstraction — it feeds into an industry with tangible consequences for employment, trade, and economic resilience. A graduation rate of one in four, combined with a 36 percent collapse in enrolment in the marine school itself, represents a significant failure to deliver on a mandate that the Jamaican public funds through its taxes and that the Jamaican economy depends on for skilled labour.

The governance findings in the audit are consistent with an institution that lacked the internal discipline to catch and correct these problems. CMI operated throughout the audit period without a Board Charter — the foundational document that sets out a Board’s responsibilities, operating procedures, and accountability mechanisms. No Board member performance evaluations were conducted between March 2012 and July 2015, a gap of more than three years. The Board spent $317,500 purchasing 13 tablets for its members in breach of Ministry of Finance policy. Seven employees received a combined $3.7 million in scholarship assistance without bonding agreements in place, meaning CMI had no contractual basis to recover those funds if the employees left. Two employees were overpaid a combined $471,500 in salary, and no attempt was made to recover the money.

A motor vehicle incident in March 2014 illustrates the compliance culture the audit found in place. A CMI vehicle was carrying nine passengers at the time of an accident, despite having a licensed capacity of seven. The incident was not reported to the Attorney General, the Financial Secretary, or the Auditor General — all notifications required under government policy. Two CMI bank accounts were overdrawn four times in March 2015, generating $24,465 in interest charges that the institution had no authority to incur. Individually, some of these incidents might seem minor. Collectively, they describe an institution that was not meeting its own obligations with any consistency.

The Auditor General’s recommendations addressed the range of failures identified. CMI was advised to undertake a thorough assessment of the resources needed to meet its corporate plan targets, and to strengthen its internal controls to achieve compliance with the guidelines it was already bound by. Management’s responses, submitted at the time of the report, were incomplete. A draft Board Charter had been submitted to the Permanent Secretary in November 2015. A draft receivables policy was promised for presentation to the Board’s Finance subcommittee by March 2016, though it had not yet been presented when the audit was published. These were partial and preliminary responses to findings that had been years in the making.

What the audit of CMI ultimately reveals is a pattern that Jamaican public institutions have produced before — one in which expansion is treated as inherently positive, governance structures are allowed to remain skeletal, and financial controls are deferred until the consequences become impossible to ignore. CMI doubled its student population in five years. That might have been a genuine achievement if it had been matched by investment in teaching quality, physical infrastructure, and financial management. Instead, the expansion outpaced every supporting system the institution had in place.

The implications extend beyond CMI itself. When a maritime training institution graduates only one in four of the students it enrols, and when enrolment in its core seafaring programme falls by more than a third, the national maritime workforce is directly affected. When $134 million in fees is deemed unrecoverable from students who nonetheless completed portions of their studies, the taxpayer absorbs the difference. When a Board operates without a charter and goes three years without evaluating its own members, there is no functioning accountability mechanism at the highest level of the institution’s governance. The Auditor General identified the root causes with precision: absent resource planning, inadequate staffing, weak revenue management, a strategic disconnect from the institution’s core mandate, and governance frameworks that existed in name rather than practice. Addressing those causes requires more than draft policies submitted for future approval. It requires a sustained commitment, at both the institutional and ministerial level, to building the management discipline that CMI’s audit showed was missing across a five-year span.

Jamaica Accountability Watch is an independent editorial series by Jamaica Homes News examining what government audit reports reveal about the management of public money. Source: Auditor General’s Department of Jamaica.

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