Payroll errors costing taxpayers near $120m

to compensate for time we hire a lot of people.”

Pointing to specific difficulties, Mr Wilson said: “Everyone knows of the employees who get lost in the system. In the Family Islands, they work for local government, they work for the school board, but they are hired irregularly. They’re not in the pay sheet, they’re paid by some other mechanism or some other means.

“Every employee is going to be captured in this system. That is for us critical because we assume, sometimes wrongly, that we know of every employee, that we know the details of every employee. But every year, we find instances where we do not know an employee existed or was being paid or has been paid by the Government or the ministry.

“I know from my own experience in the Ministry of Finance we had employees in Andros who we paid for 40 years, every month, employees of the Ministry of Finance. We don’t know what he did, never did an ACR of those employees, but they were paid every month and they retired,” he added. “And what they did when they retired? They took a flight and come up to the Ministry of Finance and said I retired, where is my gratuity? And we had no answer. We checked their records and, yes, surely enough we paid them from 1974 up until 2014, every month, but we had no record. We have too much instances like that, and persons go undetected, and then we have to go through this long, arduous process of trying to regularise them.”

Mr Wilson said the Oracle system’s time attendance feature will allow agencies to keep track of employees that work outside the Ministry of Finance headquarters. He added that in larger ministries such as education, employees may be absent from work for months without human resources being aware.

“Things such as time attendance, which we don’t have in the public service, is a key feature in this new application,” Mr Wilson said.”For larger agencies such as the Ministry of Education, time attendance is critical. You have 5,000 employees and 90 percent

Albany developer charged on ‘brazen insider trading’

FROM PAGE B1 in unveiling the charges against Mr Lewis via social media, Mr Williams said: “Today I am announcing that my office, the southern district of New York, has indicted Joe Lewis, the British billionaire, for orchestrating a brazen insider trading scheme.

“We allege that, for years, Joe Lewis abused his access to corporate boardrooms and repeatedly provided inside information to his romantic partners, his personal assistants, his private pilots and his friends. These folks then traded on that inside information and made millions of dollars in the stock markets. Thanks to Joe Lewis, those bets were a sure thing.

“Now, none of this was necessary,” Mr Williams added. “Joe Lewis is a wealthy man but, as we allege, he used inside information to compensate his employees or to shower gifts on his friends and lovers. It’s classic corporate corruption. It’s cheating, and it’s against the law; laws that apply to everyone else no matter who you are.

That’s why Joe Lewis has been indicted, and will face justice here in the US in the southern district of New York.”

From a Bahamas perspective, the most important immediate issue is whatif any - impact the charges will have on Mr Lewis’ local investments and, principally, Albany, which is responsible for the direct and indirect employment of hundreds of Bahamians and injects a multi-million dollar impact annually into the economy. Any near-term fall-out is thought minimal at best.

Besides Mr Lewis’ Tavistock Group, his investment vehicle that has declared more than 200 interests and corporate holdings spread across 13 countries, Albany’s other deep-pocketed investors include worldrenowned golfers, Tiger Woods and Ernie Els, plus singer Justin Timberlake.

Albany has also been seeking to acquire its neighbouring South Ocean property, although consummation of that deal has been placed on hold due to litigation initiated by rival Austrian investor, Dr Mirko Kovats, who also resides at Lyford Cay.

Insider trading occurs when perpetrators exploit their access to privileged, non-public information to gain an unfair advantage over other investors who lack the same knowledge. They typically use the details to tip-off their family and close friends, using them to buy or sell shares ahead of a public of those employees do not work in headquarters.

“They come to work, they don’t come to work, you don’t know, sometimes for months. Those are resources that we cannot recover, significant resources. So that’s why time attendance is a big feature of this application”

Another benefit of the system, Mr Wilson explained, is that less human intervention will be required when processing promotions and salary adjustments.

He said: “Paperless means less intervention by the finance accounting officer. Right now, in the public sector, promotions are done by the Commission, goes back into the ministry. The ministry sends one letter to the JD Edwards unit who uploads the new salary. That then goes into the department of the ministry, then the department calculates the back pay and make adjustments.

“In the new paradigm, promotions will be done by the Commission. That information will go into the JD Edwards unit and that’s it. Backpay calculated, salary changed, all of the above. Intervention from a department level will not be necessary.”

Mr Wilson added that Oracle has agreed to help transfer the existing payroll data on to its platform, ensuring that critical information is not lost or compromised. “That’s why we’re staying primarily with the Oracle family of applications, because the risks of moving to a different platform and not being sure of your data integrity was too great,” he added. “We are not simply doing what we did before when you go in detail in terms of what offerings are under the fusion platform. You will realise this is not business as usual. We want to elevate and move the public service forward.”

Mr Wilson said he is hopeful the new platform will launch early next year and recognised the important role that financial officers will play in its successful implementation.

“The next couple of months is going to be very intense. Because we have gathered the information and the work rules to make sure that we flip the switch, hopefully around January/ February, the system works as necessary. And so the role of the finance accounting officers is very, very important in this transition process,” he added.

“We cannot see results unless there’s buy-in from the finance accounting officers. This is not just about technology. We realise that we have to look out for the officers…. and make sure that they are satisfied because the best technology in the world is not going to change their own colours unless persons who are responsible for making sure processes are followed and doing it correctly are motivated.”

He noted that the launch of the Oracle payroll system and human resource features will provide government with the ‘greatest potential savings’. He added that in the coming months discussions will begin on how the transition will affect procurement, accounting, vendors, budgeting and final accounts.

Mr Wilson said: “This process is comprehensive. As we move on, we’ll be talking about the linkages between the procurement and the accounting system. We will be talking about vendor relationships and how they will be impacted; changed by the system. And, finally, we’ll talk budgeting and the final accounts.

“We want new final accounts which can be read by anybody, understood by anybody. That’s critical. To me, that’s a mark of success. Those are things that will be covered in the coming months but, right now, the first phase of this is concentrating on payroll, human resource models, because that’s what we are going to launch first and that has the greatest potential savings for the Government.” revelation that typically boosts or lowers the stock’s value, thereby enabling all to make significant profits with the initial perpetrator sharing in the windfall.

The grand jury indictment against Mr Lewis, which was unsealed yesterday, alleged that the Lyford Cay billionaire tipped his closest associates to the results of clinical trials. He is purported to have shared information on life sciences groups, Solid Biosciences and Mirati Therapeutics, plus beef producer Australian Agricultural Company and a special acquisition company, BCTG. Life sciences investments are among those that feature in Tavistock Group’s portfolio.

Prosecutors said that in some insider trading cases, Mr Lewis lent money to recipients of his tips, including in October 2019 when he wired $1m to two pilots so they could buy more Mirati shares. The indictment quoted one pilot texting a friend that “boss lent Marty and I $500,000 each for this”, and that he thought “the boss has inside info” because “otherwise why would he make us invest”.

Both pilots allegedly repaid their loans soon after Mirati announced favourable results from a clinical trial, causing its stock price to rise 16.7 percent. “Loan payback for MRTX,” the second pilot wrote in his records.

Mr Lewis, who started out in east London’s restaurant industry, moved to The Bahamas in 1979 and is said to have made his fortune from currency trading and speculation. According to the Sunday Times’ 2023 ‘rich list’, he has a net worth of some £5.096bn.

He previously owned New Providence Development Company, before exiting the investment and handing the company over to his former business partner, New Orleans-based Terry White, to focus on Albany’s development. Mr Lewis also owns the majority of English Premier League soccer club, Tottenham Hotspur, while the Tavistock Group also developed the Lake Nona and Isleworth communities in Florida.