Chairman of the Social Security Board (SSB) Lois Young has confirmed to Amandala that the board of directors of the SSB has voted to terminate its Chief Executive Officer, Merlene Bailey-Martinez, following an external audit conducted by Pannell Kerr Forster, following allegations that she was involved in a staff scheme to benefit—using insider knowledge—from the recent government mortgage write-off program by paying down their debts to meet the ceiling of $50,000.
Amandala has sought comment from the CEO herself; however, she has declined our request for an interview. When we called her this evening, she was unavailable.
Bailey-Martinez was put on administrative leave on Wednesday, January 11, along with SSB’s internal auditor Denise Mahler. Young said that the board ruled in Mahler’s favor on Tuesday, and she has since returned to work, since indications are that she was not involved in the scheme.
Both the union and the private sector representatives on the SSB’s board, and at least one of four government reps, voted for Bailey-Martinez’s termination. Only two government reps voted in favor of keeping her, including acting chair, Ariel Mitchell.
(At the time of the voting, chairman Young was out of the country, and she indicated to us that her vote would not have been able to sway things in the CEO’s favor.)
Young stressed that Bailey-Martinez made no profit from the SSB fund whatsoever, and she could not have profited because the transaction had nothing to do with the fund.
She added that the Prime Minister never excluded SSB staffers from being added to the list for the mortgage write-off.
Ironically, the first loan write-off list compiled last year did not include the CEO’s name, but someone added her name to the revised January list, prepared after the CEO was put on administrative leave. Prime Minister Dean Barrow had indicated to our newspaper that the CEO could not have put her name there.
Barrow has told our newspaper, for the record, that Bailey-Martinez’s loan will not be honored in the government write-off.
Her loan was originally $80,000, and it appeared with a principal balance of $20,000 on the write-off list with a disbursement date of August 2011, two months before the original write-off list was presented to the Prime Minister.