Ministry settles $36m in Children’s Authority debts

Min­is­ter of the Peo­ple, So­cial De­vel­op­ment and Fam­i­ly Ser­vices Van­dana Mo­hit to­day pre­sent­ed cheques to the Chil­dren’s Au­thor­i­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go to cov­er re­cent­ly au­dit­ed out­stand­ing pay­ments to­talling $36,039,734.51.

In a me­dia re­lease, the min­istry said the pay­ments cov­ered long-out­stand­ing in­voic­es for op­er­a­tional ser­vices and con­trac­tu­al oblig­a­tions, which it said were es­sen­tial to en­sur­ing the con­tin­ued de­liv­ery of care and pro­tec­tion ser­vices to chil­dren un­der the Au­thor­i­ty’s care.

The pay­ments in­clud­ed $31,278,765.70 for se­cu­ri­ty ser­vices pro­vid­ed by var­i­ous com­pa­nies, $2,903,299.85 for works at the Na­tion­al Care and Em­pow­er­ment Cen­tre, and $1,857,668.96 for jan­i­to­r­i­al ser­vices.

The min­istry said the pay­ments re­flect­ed its com­mit­ment to ad­dress­ing in­her­it­ed debts, pro­mot­ing ac­count­abil­i­ty, im­prov­ing ser­vice de­liv­ery and safe­guard­ing vul­ner­a­ble chil­dren.

It added that set­tling the out­stand­ing sums would help pre­vent lit­i­ga­tion against the Au­thor­i­ty and its cur­rent board over un­paid jan­i­to­r­i­al ser­vice con­tracts.

The min­istry al­so thanked the Min­istry of Fi­nance for its sup­port in re­solv­ing the mat­ter.