Ministry awaits Red Cross audits before reassessing funding

Carisa Lee

The Min­istry of the Peo­ple, So­cial De­vel­op­ment and Fam­i­ly Ser­vices (MPS­DFS) says once the Trinidad and To­ba­go Red Cross So­ci­ety (TTRCS) com­pletes its au­dits, it will re­assess the gov­ern­ment’s fi­nan­cial re­la­tion­ship with the hu­man­i­tar­i­an or­gan­i­sa­tion. The Min­istry added that, at present, it has no ac­tive fi­nan­cial re­la­tion­ship with the Red Cross.

“The Min­istry ac­knowl­edges that the or­gan­i­sa­tion is in the process of up­dat­ing its records and has since sub­mit­ted au­dit­ed state­ments for the pe­ri­od 2019–2022. Up­on full com­pli­ance, the Min­istry will un­der­take an as­sess­ment of the or­gan­i­sa­tion, guid­ed by es­tab­lished mon­i­tor­ing and eval­u­a­tion pro­ce­dures to de­ter­mine any fu­ture fund­ing con­sid­er­a­tions,” the re­lease said.

Last month, at the re­open­ing of the South Branch, Vice Pres­i­dent Ed­ward Mood­ie re­vealed that the so­ci­ety was broke and that the new ex­ec­u­tive was ty­ing up loose ends, start­ing with com­plet­ing out­stand­ing au­dits. The last year, 2024, he said, would be sub­mit­ted this month.

In No­vem­ber last year, the gov­ern­ment sus­pend­ed the $730,000 an­nu­al sub­ven­tion due to out­stand­ing au­dits for more than a decade.

The Min­istry added that, along with the TTRCS, it re­mains com­mit­ted to their shared man­date of sup­port­ing the most vul­ner­a­ble mem­bers of so­ci­ety, a com­mit­ment reaf­firmed dur­ing meet­ings held ear­li­er this year.

In an ex­clu­sive in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia, Mood­ie re­vealed that the or­gan­i­sa­tion is owed over a mil­lion dol­lars and may have to ex­plore le­gal op­tions to col­lect it.

He added that the new ex­ec­u­tive found a break­down in am­bu­lance op­er­a­tions and al­so iden­ti­fied the need to rene­go­ti­ate sev­er­al con­tracts.

Mood­ie said every­one on the ex­ec­u­tive was cur­rent­ly vol­un­teer­ing as they ex­plored op­tions such as the liq­ui­da­tion of cer­tain as­sets to make pay­roll and an in­crease in fees for first aid and CPR train­ing pro­grammes of­fered to cor­po­rate T&T.

He said the Red Cross was work­ing to re­build trust with all mem­bers and vol­un­teers.