Swaratsingh denies ordering Fraud Squad relocation from Finance Ministry

Shane Su­perville 

Fears mount­ed briefly with­in law en­force­ment cir­cles that se­nior Fraud Squad of­fi­cers and sen­si­tive case files may soon be dis­placed from their cur­rent of­fices on the sev­enth floor of the Min­istry of Fi­nance’s Wright­son Road build­ing. But Min­is­ter of Plan­ning Kennedy Swarats­ingh de­nies any­one will be dis­placed. 

Ac­cord­ing to sources,  Swarats­ingh, who is al­so Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Fi­nance toured the build­ing on Mon­day and al­leged­ly or­dered that all Fraud Squad of­fi­cers and their doc­u­ments be moved to the sixth floor by Fri­day.

The sev­enth floor cur­rent­ly hous­es se­nior of­fi­cers, in­clud­ing the Se­nior Su­per­in­ten­dent, As­sis­tant Su­per­in­ten­dent, a Su­per­in­ten­dent and an In­spec­tor, as well as case files and ev­i­dence ex­hibits. Ju­nior of­fi­cers are based on the sixth floor, which con­sists of cu­bi­cles, in­ter­view rooms and gen­er­al of­fice equip­ment.

The re­port­ed move sparked con­cern about in­ad­e­quate space on the sixth floor to ac­com­mo­date both per­son­nel and files, rais­ing ques­tions about op­er­a­tional ef­fi­cien­cy, file in­tegri­ty, and over­sight.

When con­tact­ed on Wednes­day, Swarats­ingh de­nied giv­ing any such di­rec­tive and said the vis­it was part of an as­sess­ment to lo­cate avail­able floor­space for a pos­si­ble staff ex­pan­sion with­in the Board of In­land Rev­enue (BIR).

“It’s not ur­gent right now be­cause we did find some ad­di­tion­al space, be­cause we have to en­sure the BIR is staffed so it can do the work it is meant to do. And of course if you have ad­di­tion­al staff, you have to have ad­di­tion­al space. So I did vis­it every­where and look to see where space is avail­able, so I will do a ra­tio­nal­i­sa­tion at some stage but not now,” he said.

Swarats­ingh al­so con­firmed that any changes af­fect­ing the Fraud Squad would be for­mal­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ed to act­ing Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er Ju­nior Ben­jamin and Min­is­ter of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Roger Alexan­der.

“If I have to do any­thing I will do it in writ­ing and not by word of mouth.”

In a What­sApp re­sponse to Guardian Me­dia on Wednes­day, an of­fi­cial from the TTPS Cor­po­rate Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Unit con­firmed that the Fraud Squad of­fi­cers would re­main in their cur­rent lo­ca­tion.