Jamaica’s Tourism Development Agency Bypassed Its Own Feasibility Rules, Auditor General Finds

Tourism is the economic lifeline that underpins employment, foreign exchange earnings and government revenue across Jamaica, making the agencies responsible for its development among the most consequential in the public sector. A performance audit of the Tourism Product Development Company, published by the Auditor General of Jamaica in March 2022, found that the agency adopted sound project management procedures and then failed to apply them consistently — raising hard questions about how effectively public money is being used to build the tourism product that millions of Jamaicans depend on for their livelihoods.

Tourism is not a luxury export for Jamaica — it is the economic engine that keeps the country running. Before the pandemic halted global travel, the sector accounted for a substantial share of Jamaica’s foreign exchange earnings, sustained hundreds of thousands of jobs across parishes from Westmoreland to Portland, and provided the revenue base that underpins government spending on hospitals, schools and roads. The agency assigned to shape, protect and develop what visitors actually experience on the island — the Tourism Product Development Company, known as TPDCo — sits at the centre of that economic story. A performance audit by the Auditor General of Jamaica, published in March 2022, raises serious questions about whether TPDCo is managing its work with the rigour that responsibility demands.

TPDCo was established to do what its name suggests: develop Jamaica’s tourism product. That encompasses beach facilities, roadside attractions, craft markets, heritage sites, nature trails and the physical infrastructure that visitors encounter from the moment they leave the airport. The agency operates under the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment and its mandate is directly tied to National Outcome 12 of Vision 2030, the country’s long-term development blueprint. That outcome identifies tourism as a leading sector capable of driving inclusive economic growth, lifting communities out of poverty and generating the foreign exchange Jamaica needs to service its debt and finance development. The stakes, in other words, are not administrative. They are national.

The Auditor General’s examination focused on whether TPDCo was delivering on that mandate efficiently and effectively, with particular attention to how the agency manages its projects, documents its work and applies internal controls. What the audit found was a picture of an organisation that has made genuine progress in building systems but has struggled to apply those systems with consistency.

On the positive side, the audit acknowledged that TPDCo has the governance structures appropriate for a public agency of its size and function. Boards, committees and oversight mechanisms are in place. The agency also moved in March 2019 to implement Standard Operating Procedures for project management — a significant administrative step that signals an institutional intention to operate with discipline and accountability. The Auditor General also found that TPDCo had expressed a commitment to conducting feasibility studies and cost-benefit analyses before projects receive approval, a practice that, if applied consistently, would protect public funds from being spent on initiatives that lack the evidence base to justify investment.

Those positives, however, are substantially qualified by what the audit found when it examined how those commitments translated into practice.

The first significant area of concern involves human resource practices and performance reporting. The Auditor General found weaknesses in both, a finding that carries implications well beyond internal administration. Performance reporting is not a bureaucratic formality. It is the mechanism through which a public agency demonstrates to the Ministry, to Cabinet and ultimately to the Jamaican public that the money allocated to it is producing results. When performance reporting is weak, there is no reliable way to know whether TPDCo’s projects are delivering on their objectives, whether the tourism product is actually improving, or whether public resources are being deployed where they generate the greatest return. For a sector as important as tourism, that information gap is not trivial.

Weaknesses in human resource practices compound that concern. Agencies that do not manage their workforce with proper procedures — covering recruitment, deployment, evaluation and accountability — risk losing institutional capacity precisely when it is needed most. Tourism development is a long-cycle enterprise. Projects take years to plan, fund and execute. If the people responsible for carrying that work forward are not managed through sound HR systems, the organisation accumulates vulnerabilities that only become visible when something goes wrong. For an agency whose output directly shapes the visitor experience across Jamaica’s most economically productive sector, that kind of institutional fragility carries real costs.

The second major finding concerns records management. The audit identified deficient practices in how TPDCo maintains and organises the documentation that supports its project activities. This is a problem that can appear technical on the surface but has direct consequences for accountability. Public project management depends on a paper trail — contracts, correspondence, site reports, approvals, financial records. When those records are incomplete, disorganised or missing, it becomes impossible for auditors, supervisors or the public to reconstruct what happened on a project, verify that procurement was conducted properly, or assess whether public money was spent as intended. It also creates legal exposure for the agency if contracts are disputed or if irregularities are later alleged.

For Jamaicans in communities where TPDCo projects are intended to create economic opportunity — a restored craft market in a rural parish, a rehabilitated beach facility that supports local vendors, a heritage site that draws visitors to a community that needs tourism revenue — deficient records management means there may be no reliable account of how an investment was managed. That matters to the people in those communities. It matters to the small business owners and artisans who depend on tourist traffic. And it matters to every Jamaican taxpayer whose money funded the work.

The third finding cuts deepest, because it reveals a gap between what TPDCo says it does and what the audit found it actually does. While the agency had committed to conducting feasibility studies and cost-benefit analyses before approving projects — and the Auditor General acknowledged that commitment as a point of good practice — the audit found that in some cases, feasibility studies were absent. An agency that adopts a standard operating procedure and then applies it selectively has not really adopted a procedure. It has adopted a policy for the cases where it is convenient to follow one.

Feasibility studies exist for a reason. They force decision-makers to assess whether a proposed project is viable, whether the costs are proportionate to the expected benefits, and whether the investment is the best use of available funds compared to alternatives. Skipping that step does not mean a project will automatically fail — some may succeed on experience and judgement alone. But removing the evidence base that justifies expenditure leaves the agency exposed if a project underperforms, and sends a signal to the broader public sector that procedures adopted with institutional fanfare can be quietly set aside when they become inconvenient. In a country that has spent decades working to stretch limited public resources across competing development priorities, that kind of inconsistency is a structural problem, not a minor administrative note.

The combined weight of these three findings — weak performance reporting, poor records management and the inconsistent application of a procedure the agency itself regards as good practice — points to an organisation that has built the scaffolding of sound governance without consistently living inside it. The governance structures are present. The policy commitments exist on paper. But the audit suggests that neither has been sufficiently embedded in day-to-day operations to give the public confidence that Jamaica’s tourism product development is being managed with the discipline the country’s economic interests require.

Tourism’s importance to Jamaica is not abstract. The sector employs tour operators, taxi drivers, hotel workers, craft vendors, restaurant owners, water sports operators and the hundreds of thousands of people, formal and informal, who earn a living because visitors choose to spend money on the island. When tourism development falters — when projects are poorly planned, inadequately documented or managed through inconsistently applied procedures — the consequences ripple outward into communities, into household incomes and into parish economies that have few alternative engines of growth. A beach facility that deteriorates because a project was never properly scoped or its records were never properly maintained is not merely an administrative failure. It is a lost income stream for the vendors, operators and workers who depend on it.

The implications extend to Jamaica’s position in a fiercely competitive global tourism market. Destination competitiveness is built on the quality and reliability of the product on offer. Infrastructure matters. Visitor attractions matter. The maintenance of natural and cultural heritage matters. Rival Caribbean destinations invest deliberately and systematically in these elements. If the agency charged with developing and enhancing Jamaica’s tourism product is operating with inconsistently applied procedures and incomplete records, the country’s ability to keep pace with that competition is compromised in ways that aggregate market data may not immediately reveal but that communities and workers eventually feel.

Vision 2030 sets an ambitious target for tourism as a driver of broad-based economic growth. Achieving that target depends on agencies like TPDCo functioning at a level of efficiency and accountability that the audit suggests has not yet been consistently achieved. The distance between the governance structures the agency has built and the operational discipline the audit found it applying is the distance between a plan and its execution — and it is in that gap that public resources are most at risk of being wasted.

The audit’s findings point toward a clear path grounded in the systems TPDCo has already begun to construct. The Standard Operating Procedures adopted in 2019 are a foundation worth reinforcing — but only if the agency treats them as binding operational requirements rather than aspirational guidance subject to case-by-case waiver. Feasibility studies must be conducted for every project without exception, with documentation of both the analysis conducted and the decision reached. Records management must be professionalised and subjected to regular internal review so that the documentation trail supporting every project is complete, organised and maintained in accordance with the standards that public accountability demands.

Performance reporting must become a genuine management tool rather than a compliance output — one that captures measurable outcomes, gives the Ministry of Tourism and the broader public meaningful data on whether spending on the tourism product is producing improvements in visitor experience and community economic benefit, and holds the agency to account when it falls short. Human resource practices must be strengthened to match the complexity and duration of the projects TPDCo is asked to deliver. The Auditor General’s findings do not suggest an organisation beyond repair. The architecture of accountability is present. What the audit makes clear is that architecture and consistent practice are not the same thing — and for an agency whose mandate touches the economic lives of so many Jamaicans, that distinction can no longer be treated as a work in progress.

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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