By Hilbert Haar
I always thought that bookkeeping was rather simple. You spend money, you book it as expenditures. You receive money, you book it as income or revenue. The difference between expenditures and revenue is one of two things: a surplus or a deficit. If you want a deficit to look like a surplus you would have to cook the books.
St. Maarten became an autonomous country within the Dutch kingdom on October 10, 2010. It is maybe good to remember that on that occasion the Netherlands took care of the mountain of debts the now former Netherlands Antilles had left behind. I don’ remember the exact mount but it was a lot of money.
It did not take long for St. Maarten to complain that it had not received its fair share of this so called debt-restructuring operation. The reason became clear rather quickly: St. Maarten was unable to prove that the debts it claimed to have really existed.
Ouch. Over the years the battle about these debts disappeared into the proverbial political jungle. Life went on – as usual I might add.
To obtain its autonomous status St. Maarten agreed to the establishment of the Board for Financial Supervision, known by its Dutch acronym as Cft.
Whoever thought that this would put our public finances in safe hands, knows better by now. St. Maarten is unable to repay millions in loans it received from the Netherlands in 2010 (2010! That’s almost fifteen years ago). Our government is apparently also unable to submit quarterly reports in a timely manner to financial supervisor Cft. That same Cft has been urging our country for many years to improve its financial management.
In spite of all this, our country’s bookkeeping is still in an unacceptable mess. Why? I would understand if St. Maarten had been unable to get the books in order within a year – or three years. But fifteen years and counting? That smells like unwill, incompetence or plain old sabotage.
Maybe some readers think this is of no concern to them. But hey bro, we’re talking about public money here. In other words: your money.
Fortunately it is never too late to turn a bad situation around. Our government could still hire a bookkeeper who knows what he or she is doing.
In this context, the history of our still young country is not encouraging. That will only change if somebody – anybody, really – steps up to the plate, calls out this gross case of financial mismanagement and demands serious improvements.
Will that ever happen? Never say never, but deep down I cannot convince myself to be optimistic.
Related articles:
Cft critical of St. Maarten’s financial reporting
Cft dossier>>>
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