Millions in Public Funds Paid to Government Advisors Without Evaluations, Proper Contracts or Competitive Bids

A performance audit by the Auditor General of Jamaica found that three major government ministries paid tens of millions of dollars to consultants, advisors and assistants in ways that could not be properly justified, evaluated or accounted for. The findings expose systemic governance failures that erode public trust and deprive Jamaican taxpayers of the value they are entitled to expect from public spending. At the heart of the report is a troubling irony: the very ministry responsible for setting the rules on consultant engagement was among those caught breaking them.

When Jamaican families pay their taxes, they do so on the understanding that public money will be spent carefully, transparently and according to rules designed to protect the national interest. A performance audit released by the Auditor General of Jamaica covering the period April 2010 to August 2016 reveals that across three of the country’s most significant ministries, that understanding was repeatedly violated — not through single acts of carelessness, but through patterns of weak governance that persisted for years.

The audit examined the engagement of consultants, advisors and assistants to Ministers at the Ministry of Finance and Public Service (MoFPS), the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM), and the Ministry of Education, Youth and Information (MoEYI). The Auditor General reviewed 189 files in total. While 80 percent showed no material concerns, the remaining 20 percent revealed significant weaknesses — and the scale of the financial irregularities embedded within those files is sobering.

The total value of payments made in breach of established rules, or without adequate justification, runs into tens of millions of dollars. These are not administrative technicalities. They represent real money drawn from the public purse — money that could have funded classroom supplies, rural road repairs, water infrastructure, or primary healthcare — spent in ways that government’s own policies prohibit.

Perhaps the most fundamental failure identified relates to gratuity payments — end-of-contract bonuses that government policy explicitly ties to demonstrated performance. MoFPS Circular No. 15 is clear: before a gratuity payment can be made, a satisfactory performance evaluation must be completed. This requirement exists precisely because gratuity represents a reward for results, not simply for having occupied a position.

At MoFPS, five advisors and assistants received gratuity totalling J$7.6 million without any formal evaluation having been conducted. At MoEYI, three of nine officers received gratuity payments amounting to J$1.3 million under the same circumstances. Combined, J$8.9 million in public funds were disbursed as performance-linked payments to individuals whose performance was never formally assessed. The OPM was found to be compliant in this area — which only underscores the fact that compliance is achievable when ministries choose to prioritise it.

The consequences of this failure extend beyond the money itself. Performance evaluations are the mechanism through which government holds its contract staff accountable. Without them, there is no basis for determining whether an advisor delivered value, whether they met their objectives, or whether the public received anything meaningful in return for the investment. When gratuity flows regardless of outcome, the evaluation process becomes meaningless and the incentive to perform is correspondingly weakened.

Closely connected to this problem is the audit’s finding that a number of advisors and assistants at MoEYI were engaged without Terms of Reference or job descriptions in place. Of twelve advisors reviewed at MoEYI, five had no formally documented scope of work. Over the period under review, salaries totalling J$22.6 million were paid to fill roles that had never been properly defined.

This matters in a way that ordinary Jamaicans will readily understand. When a parent employs a tradesperson to repair a roof, the first question is: what exactly are you being hired to do? Without a defined scope, there is no way to determine whether the job was done, done well, or done at all. The same logic applies to public sector engagements. When a ministry contracts an advisor without specifying what that advisor is expected to accomplish, it creates conditions where public money can be absorbed without accountability, and where no one — not the minister, not the permanent secretary, not the taxpayer — can point to a concrete output that justifies the expenditure.

The audit also identified widespread salary irregularities. Across a sample of 68 advisors and assistants drawn from all three ministries, 22 individuals — nearly one in three — were paid above the maximum salary scales approved for their positions. The excess payments ranged from 15 percent to 136 percent above the approved maximums, and in aggregate, they amounted to J$26.1 million in over-scale disbursements: J$6.5 million at MoFPS, J$16.4 million at OPM, and J$3.2 million at MoEYI.

The most extreme individual case involved an assistant at the OPM who was paid J$2.6 million against a scale maximum of J$1.1 million — an overpayment of 136 percent. No adequate justification was provided for deviating so dramatically from the approved scale. These are not minor rounding errors or modest adjustments for cost of living; they represent a pattern of paying political appointees at levels the approved framework does not sanction, with no documented basis for doing so.

It is on the procurement side of the audit, however, that some of the most serious findings emerge. Four of nine locally funded consultancy contracts reviewed — 44 percent — were found to have violated Government of Jamaica procurement guidelines. These breaches included contracts awarded without competitive quotations, without Procurement Committee approval, and in circumstances where the basis for determining the contract price could not be ascertained at all.

One case at MoFPS stands out for what it reveals about how procurement rules can be circumvented in practice. A public education campaign contract valued at J$5.7 million was awarded by direct selection rather than through competitive bidding. The justification offered was that the procurement constituted an emergency. The Auditor General flatly rejected this reasoning, pointing out that the annual budget presentation — the event the campaign was apparently designed to support — is a predictable, recurring event on the government calendar, not an unforeseen emergency. J$2.4 million had already been disbursed before the contract was terminated, and the basis for that payment could not be established.

This is precisely the kind of procurement manipulation that undermines public confidence in government. Emergency provisions exist to allow rapid response to genuine crises — floods, hurricanes, public health events. When they are invoked to justify skipping competitive bidding for a routine communications exercise, the integrity of the entire procurement framework is compromised. Every legitimate contractor who might have submitted a competitive bid was denied the opportunity.

At MoEYI, two additional procurement failures deserve particular attention. The first involves a contract to review arrears arising from the reclassification of teachers — a matter with direct consequences for thousands of educators and the functioning of Jamaica’s public school system. The contract was originally valued at J$13.7 million. By the time the work was completed, the bill had escalated to J$32.2 million, an increase of J$18.5 million, representing a cost overrun of 135 percent. The project also ran seven months beyond its scheduled completion date.

The Auditor General attributed this failure to inadequate due diligence and poor work scoping before the contract was awarded. In plain terms, the ministry did not properly understand what it was commissioning before it signed the contract, and as a result, Jamaican taxpayers paid more than twice the original price for a project that arrived late. The students, parents and teachers whose schools depend on a well-functioning education bureaucracy paid the indirect cost of that dysfunction.

The second MoEYI procurement failure was arguably the most brazen. A neuro-linguistic training programme was delivered and billed at a cost of J$1.8 million — approximately US$16,915 at prevailing exchange rates — before any contract was signed and before any procurement approval was obtained. This is a direct breach of Section 53 of the Financial Management Regulations, which prohibits the incurring of expenditure without proper authorisation. The ministry, in its response to the audit, claimed compliance despite the documented evidence to the contrary.

The broader pattern the audit reveals is one of systemic governance weakness rather than isolated error. The Auditor General identified several root causes: poor planning and due diligence before contracts are awarded, a lack of transparency in procurement decision-making, and weak monitoring and evaluation frameworks that allow irregularities to persist undetected. The audit also noted a sharp contrast in compliance levels between donor-funded projects — which showed markedly better adherence to rules — and locally funded ones. The inference is unavoidable: when external oversight is present, compliance improves; when it is absent, standards slip.

The most structurally significant finding, though, may be the role of MoFPS itself. The Ministry of Finance and Public Service is the body responsible for developing and enforcing the very circulars and guidelines that govern consultant engagements across government. It is the institutional custodian of public financial management rules. Yet the audit found MoFPS to be among the ministries that violated those rules — paying gratuities without evaluations, making excess salary disbursements without justification, and presiding over a procurement award that misused the emergency exemption provision. If the ministry that writes the rules does not follow them, the signal sent to every other ministry, department and agency across the public sector is corrosive.

The Auditor General recommended that all engagements conform to established procurement guidelines and MoFPS circulars, and that MoFPS take the lead in standardising performance evaluation processes across all Ministries, Departments and Agencies. Management responses from MoFPS and MoEYI offered contextual explanations but fell short of fully accepting the findings. MoEYI’s claim of compliance in the face of documented contractual timing violations suggests that the gap between stated policy and actual practice remains wide.

For Jamaican taxpayers, the lesson from this audit is both clear and uncomfortable. The rules governing how government engages and pays advisors exist to protect public money and generate genuine value for the public. When those rules are treated as optional — when gratuity flows without evaluation, when salaries are set above approved scales without justification, when contracts are awarded by direct selection on false emergency grounds, and when training is delivered before a contract is even signed — the consequences are not merely procedural. They translate directly into public money that cannot be accounted for, public servants who cannot be evaluated, and public services that remain underfunded. The path forward requires not new rules but the disciplined application of existing ones — beginning with the ministry most responsible for setting the standard.

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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