HGP Nightly News – Hundreds of millions of dollars in unaccounted drugs, contracts awarded without advertisement, and a trail of missing documents stretching back years. That is the picture APNU Member of Parliament Vinceroy Jordan says the latest Auditor General’s Report paints of Region 5’s financial management.
Jordan, speaking to the findings tabled in the National Assembly, pointed to what he described as deeply troubling discrepancies in the Mahaica-Berbice Regional Administration’s handling of pharmaceutical supplies in 2024.
According to the report, the region issued two Inter-Departmental Warrants totalling $344 million to the Ministry of Health for drugs and medical supplies, yet the value of supplies it actually received came to $604.221 million, a staggering $260.221 million more than what was originally warranted.
When auditors moved to investigate the gap, they were stopped cold: the Regional Administration had failed to produce the records necessary to reconcile the quantities and types of drugs requested against those received, leaving the discrepancy not just unexplained, but effectively unexaminable.
That failure of record-keeping, Jordan argued, did not exist in isolation. The same report flagged a series of procurement breaches that painted a broader picture of an administration operating well outside the boundaries of the law.
Eight contracts valued at $53.698 million were awarded without public advertisement, and the Regional Administration failed to carry out the prequalification of bidders as required under Section 26(1)(a) of the Procurement Act 2003, a statutory obligation, not a suggestion.
The Auditor General recommended that the Head of the Budget Agency move to ensure compliance and prevent further breaches, though for Jordan, the damage was already done.
Perhaps most damaging to any claim of transparency, however, was what the report revealed about the award of contracts more broadly.
Some 42 contracts totalling $77.392 million were found to have no evaluation reports available for audit review, making it impossible to determine whether the Regional Procurement and Tender Administration Board had awarded those contracts through any genuinely competitive or transparent process.
And critically, this was not a new problem, in 2023, a staggering 125 evaluation reports covering contracts valued at $439.899 million were equally unavailable for scrutiny, suggesting that the absence of documentation has become less an accident and more a habit.
The repeated disappearance of key records, the pattern of procurement violations, and the unresolved questions surrounding how over $600 million in medical supplies moved through the region without a clear paper trail all point, he argued, to systemic weaknesses that demand the immediate attention of the relevant authorities.
What is at stake, he said, is not merely bureaucratic compliance, it is the proper stewardship of public resources in a region that depends on those resources for its healthcare and its people.
