Ministry settles $75.5M in Children’s Authority commitments

The Min­istry of the Peo­ple, So­cial De­vel­op­ment and Fam­i­ly Ser­vices has set­tled more than $75.5 mil­lion in com­mit­ments to the Chil­dren’s Au­thor­i­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go, fol­low­ing a pay­ment of $8.25 mil­lion on Thurs­day.

In a me­dia re­lease, the min­istry said Min­is­ter Van­dana Mo­hit pre­sent­ed a cheque for $8,256,995.69 to the au­thor­i­ty on Oc­to­ber 15.

The cheque was re­ceived by the au­thor­i­ty’s act­ing di­rec­tor and chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer, Alaina Boo­choon.

The lat­est pay­ment brings the to­tal val­ue of com­mit­ments set­tled by the min­istry to $75,573,387.52.

The min­istry said the pay­ment re­flect­ed its com­mit­ment to ac­count­abil­i­ty, trans­paren­cy, im­proved ser­vice de­liv­ery and safe­guard­ing the wel­fare of vul­ner­a­ble cit­i­zens.

It added that set­tling the com­mit­ments would help en­sure agen­cies such as the Chil­dren’s Au­thor­i­ty could con­tin­ue their work with­out dis­rup­tion.

The min­istry al­so said the au­thor­i­ty was ex­pect­ed to strength­en its fi­nan­cial man­age­ment prac­tices to fa­cil­i­tate the time­ly set­tle­ment of in­voic­es and pre­vent fur­ther ar­rears from ac­cu­mu­lat­ing.