CoC delays mount as Sangre Grande printer breaks down

Ralph Ban­warie 

Po­lice have con­firmed a per­sis­tent is­sue af­fect­ing the pro­cess­ing of Cer­tifi­cates of Char­ac­ter (CoC), par­tic­u­lar­ly at the San­gre Grande Po­lice Sta­tion, where the ma­chine used for print­ing the cer­tifi­cates has been out of ser­vice for an ex­tend­ed pe­ri­od.

As a re­sult, of­fi­cers must trans­port com­plet­ed forms man­u­al­ly to Ari­ma or Port of Spain sta­tions for pro­cess­ing, lead­ing to long de­lays.

Ap­pli­cants are ad­vised to plan ac­cord­ing­ly and ex­pect ex­tend­ed wait­ing pe­ri­ods. The pub­lic must still sub­mit orig­i­nal cer­tifi­cates for em­ploy­ment, in­ter­views, or taxi badge re­newals, as re­ceipts are not be­ing ac­cept­ed.

Guardian Me­dia was alert­ed fol­low­ing pub­lic com­plaints from job seek­ers and taxi dri­vers frus­trat­ed by the de­lays. Sev­er­al af­fect­ed dri­vers at the Guaico Li­cens­ing Of­fice re­port­ed that clerks re­fused their badge re­new­al ap­pli­ca­tions be­cause they lacked the orig­i­nal cer­tifi­cate.

One taxi dri­ver, Samuel Rivers, said, “A re­ceipt is ev­i­dence that the busi­ness was done and those be­ing af­fect­ed should be giv­en a bligh as they are the ones who suf­fer.”

Po­lice say the mat­ter has been re­peat­ed­ly re­port­ed to the rel­e­vant au­thor­i­ties. Calls to Min­is­ter of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Roger Alexan­der went unan­swered.