A sweeping report by the Auditor-General on government-related entities with assets worth billions under their control has highlighted “misstatements” in the books of up to 30 per cent of them.

Heather Thomas, the Auditor-General, said the report followed up on previous recommendations from her office to organisations using public funds.

The groups that received “qualified” audit opinions meant that misstatements either individually or in the aggregate were “material but not pervasive” to their financial statements — or that the auditor had concluded that “the possible effects on the financial statements of undetected misstatements, if any, could be material but not pervasive”.

The report listed results from self-assessment questionnaires received from 18 organisations ranging from the Bermuda Gaming Commission to public schools and parish councils.

The BGC, formerly the Bermuda Casino Gaming Commission, has taken action on a string of recommendations, including coming up with a travel policy to track expenses incurred by its members.

The commission has agreed to conform to public sector accounting standards, to review its accrued liabilities in areas such as pensions and payroll tax, and to draw up a policy for related party transactions.

One recommendation was not acted upon, in which the Auditor-General flagged up commissioners’ “overriding” of the employee handbook resulting in “overpayment of redundancy pay”.

In response, the BGC said the handbook would be “updated to allow the Board to amend the terms of redundancy payouts above the Employment Act-suggested minimum in extenuating circumstances”.

The 59-page document comes on the heels of a report by The Royal Gazette revealing commissioner salaries after a public access to information request.

The BGC’s last audited reporting year was given as 2019.

A “partially implemented” recommendation from the Auditor-General was the commission’s lack of independent funding and dependence on the Bermuda Government.

The commission was said to be “exploring opportunities to grow alternative revenue sources”.

It explained: “Our work plan [2023-24] evidences our commitment to exploring online gaming and a national lottery as future alternative revenue sources.

“In addition, we are collecting revenues from cruise ship casinos and gaming vendors/suppliers.”

Another “partially implemented” suggestion concerned the lack of a “management review for completeness on relevant discussions and decisions, and for sign‐off by the appropriate authority of the minutes of commissioners’ meeting”.

The commission said that the recommendation would be “followed with more consistency going forward”.

An audit for the commission dated 2020 was said to be in progress, while its 2021 accounts were listed as “received, not yet scheduled”.

For the Sandys Secondary Middle School Capitation Account, Ms Thomas reported that “those charged with governance” did not provide management self-assessments by the specified dates.

The questionnaires were sent out to organisations where the last audit was in 2020 or earlier and which are not scheduled for an audit in 2023-24.

“Quite a few of the entities have reported that they have fully implemented our recommendations,” Ms Thomas wrote.

“Most of the fully implemented recommendations appear to be satisfactory and will likely result in the recommendations being fully remediated.

“In a few instances, alternative approaches were adopted, which is more than fair due to the passage of time or change in the entity environment, and it no longer makes sense to implement the recommendations as originally presented.

“There are a few recommendations that were not implemented.”

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Report on the Implementation of Recommendations from selected Government related entities .pdf

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