The Prime Minister can now monitor every dollar that is received and spent every day by state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and there’s an app for that.
She has a prototype mobile phone application written into her mobile phone which allows her to keep tabs on state enterprises’ cashflow.
“Today, the Prime Minister of Barbados has a prototype application that we have written on her mobile phone which tells her all of the money that came in that day and all the money that left,” Special Economic Advisor to the Government Professor Avinash Persaud said this morning during an online panel discussion.
Addressing the vexing problems of the lack of financial controls of state enterprises, whose debts have imperiled the Barbadian economy, Persaud warned that they would now be under heavy manners.
“We are going to be holding state-owned enterprises, not to do their accounts within five years, which has been the practice, but actually to have a full reconciled account on a monthly basis. So that’s one of the ways we are doing control,” he said, adding that the Government’s biggest expenditure problem is in the SOE’s.
He noted that the farther away one went from the operations of Central Government and towards SOEs, the harder it became to control.
“So we’ve had to change that,” he added.
Persaud also suggested that the operations of at least three SOEs are to be shifted away from Government control and into management by the private sector.
He identified the Barbados Water Authority (BWA), the Sanitation Service Authority (SSA), Caves of Barbados and Kensington Oval Management Inc. (KOMI), as potential targets for outsourcing services to the private sector and management of the enterprises.
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