AN INVESTIGATION is to be conducted into the practice of Electoral Advisory Committee (EAC) members travelling first class on official business.
Chairman of the EAC, Professor Errol Miller, says the elections body will undertake a thorough investigation of the practice, against the background of recent queries by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of Parliament.
"We have therefore undertaken to conduct a thorough investigation of the origin of this policy and practice, its rationale as well as the permission granted for such a policy and practice," Mr. Miller said in a statement yesterday.
The investigation will also look at the issue of personal liability, where EAC members made no request to travel first class but were issued with such tickets based on a long-standing policy and practice, Professor Miller added.
At Tuesday's sitting of the PAC, it emerged that the EAC routinely upgraded the economy class tickets of its travelling officers to first class whenever they travelled abroad.
This is in breach of the Government's policy guidelines relating to air travel, as only Cabinet Ministers are allowed to travel business class. All other officers are required to travel economy class.
Members of the PAC, led by Central Clarendon MP Mike Henry, raised a fuss over the issue and urged the Auditor-General to conduct further investigations with a view to slapping a surcharge on the EAC for the breach.
The EAC has spent $354,777 upgrading tickets to first class on six different occasions during 2001. During the period under review, officers attached to the EAC travelled to six countries, including South Africa, the Dominican Republic and Nica-ragua as part of observer missions.
Yesterday, Professor Miller stressed that the period being examined did not include any air travel by the current crop of EAC members. Nevertheless, he said preliminary investigations showed that the practice of upgrading tickets to first class for EAC members was long-standing.
"In fact, the matter is so routinised in the operations of the EAC that, it does not require any direction to staff from the Director of Elections or the Chairman of the EAC," Professor Miller said.
He added that part of the investigations would focus on whether the practice was designed to prevent a situation where members of EAC nominated by the Prime Minister would travel first class, while those nominated by the Leader of the Opposition as well as Selected Members would travel economy class.
Professor Miller suggested that this was a possibility, given the fact that over the years government members appointed by the Prime Minister are usually Cabinet Ministers, who fly first class as a matter of course.
The EAC is the body responsible for election policy. It has three independent members, one member appointed by the government and one member appointed by the Opposition.
