Effective tomorrow, Friday, March 30, the end of the financial year, pay-mistress for the Belize City Council, Shirlene Sabal, accused of fleecing her employers of $69,586 in 2010 and 2011, will be terminated.
Sabal had been employed for six years, since the first Zenaida Moya administration came into office in 2006, but she was suspended on half-pay pending the results of an investigation into alleged fraudulent overtime payments said to have been paid out to workers, but instead pocketed by Sabal.
That report was released earlier this week, and Amandala has obtained a copy.
The majority of the report is a list of names of employees who “received” overtime payments and “additional payments”, which were sometimes characterized as “excess salary” or “salary adjustment.”
But none of the payments were authorized, and the report notes that in several cases, employees were paid as part of the regular payroll, then separately listed as part of an “individual payroll,” usually covered by a cheque in the employee’s name.
In each case the payrolls were checked by other members of the Council’s financial department, and passed without comment despite a lack of supporting documents and not being checked with the Human Resources Department.
In several cases the actual cheques used were retrieved and found to contain endorsement signatures differing from the actual employees’ signatures, all signed by Sabal. They were generally cashed at local businesses rather than the banks.
The Council’s Vote Control Ledger and Salary Register were not available to be checked and the cheque ledgers used in the investigation were found to be “in extreme poor conditions” – one was even “torn” and seemed to have “missing pages.”
Nor were all the cheques issued put in the ledger, and when they were, they were not in sequential order. Vouchers were either missing or altered, as were cheque stubs and cancelled cheque leaves.
Most importantly, it has been requested that the Auditor General do a payroll audit going back to 2008, as according to this report, there were similar “irregularities” observed in the records for 2010 and there was not enough time to do a comprehensive investigation.
On Wednesday, City Administrator Candice Burke told Amandala that Sabal ran a “very smart scheme”; she had been in charge of paying the Council’s 300 employees, and had control of and access to the Council’s financial and administrative procedures with regard to things like overtime.
Thus, Burke told us, she would make out false cheques in the name of employees, usually for small amounts, and then cash the cheques herself, while the employee never saw a dime of the extra money; or use employees’ names to take out loans on her behalf and cover the payment as an “overtime” payment, again without the knowledge of the victim.
Apparently, Sabal was so clever and so trusted that she got by two internal audits in October of 2011 and January of 2012, as well as major audits by Central Government and the former Financial Controller, Patrick Tillett.
Burke believes this is because the amounts in each payment were so small they got lost in the volume of transactions done by the Council at payment time for its employees, and because the names chosen were random persons who would ordinarily be eligible for overtime under proper procedure.
Also, Sabal was apparently a one-woman show, as no other employee at the Council has been tagged in the investigation despite several interviews conducted with employees whose names appeared on the cheques.
According to the City Administrator, the Council had had its suspicions dating back to late last year, prompting the October audit by the Council’s Human Resources Department and the January audit, which, Burke told us, she requested herself.
Following the latter audit, Sabal was stripped of her functions until a proper investigation could be conducted.
Incoming Mayor Darrell Bradley had ordered such an investigation upon taking office and being told of the situation earlier this month.
According to Burke, the Council’s priority is to recover the money, rather than take Sabal to court. It has made strides in this end by taking possession of various assets of Sabal, including two vehicles and soon, a piece of land.
Sabal and the Council will sign an agreement establishing a re-payment plan to which Sabal must adhere in lieu of potential court action. That option is still open.
Burke told us she is satisfied that the Council has no other scandals lurking, but as part of the reform initiatives presented by the re-mixed Council, a strong internal audit committee, to be headed by an internal auditor, will be appointed, and will work with an external auditor for continued audits of the various departments of the Council.
The annual audit by Central Government, conducted by the Audit Department, begins on Monday.