Howard Mitchell Warns Public-Body Oversight Crisis Is Undermining Trust

Veteran attorney Howard Mitchell says Jamaica’s public bodies are being weakened by poor accountability and ineffective supervision, creating a serious trust gap between citizens and national institutions.

Mitchell, who leads the Government-appointed Institutional Review Committee probing governance failures at the University Hospital of the West Indies (UHWI), said the hospital’s challenges are not unique. In his view, they reflect entrenched problems across the wider public sector, including persistent breaches of rules, inadequate monitoring and weak enforcement.

“Most of them are, I believe it’s something like 12 of the 156 public bodies that are, for instance, current and up-to-date with their returns and reports under the PBMA (Public Bodies Management and Accountability Act),” Mitchell said, pointing to the depth of non-compliance in State agencies.

The committee was formed after the Auditor General’s 2025 report on procurement and governance at UHWI. Mitchell said the exercise has gone beyond one institution and exposed structural weaknesses in Jamaica’s public-administration system.

He said a key reason the failures continue is that the agencies responsible for oversight do not have enough people, training or funding to carry out sustained supervision. “So part of the problem and part of why this has occurred is because the monitoring agencies have not been sufficiently resourced and have not been sufficiently staffed and trained to help these boards operate. The Auditor General’s Department itself has resource constraints that limit follow-up oversight, so they have to touch and go. The compliance units within the Ministry of Finance and the Public Service also require greater resourcing and motivation to deepen the reach and support of the culture change that not only the hospital needs but indeed all of the public bodies,” he added.

Mitchell also said the size of the public-body network makes oversight harder to execute. “If you look at how the public bodies structure exists within the various ministries, you have ministries that have 24 public bodies to monitor and to ensure that compliance is effective. The prime minister himself has 39 agencies reporting to him,” he said.

He disclosed that at least one public body has failed to submit required reports for half a century. “Some of the agencies, these public bodies, one in particular, and I won’t name it, but one in particular has not submitted a report for 50 years, not since its inception, so you don’t know what it is doing with the public money. That is untenable and especially where we have achieved such great success with our macroeconomic management,” he added.

According to Mitchell, these governance lapses are feeding broader distrust of the State, especially when public entities do not deliver what they were created to do. “I think the political stakeholders may have finally recognised that part of the root cause of that trust deficit is the difference between promise and delivery. When they fail in that role, the feedback is immediately on the politicians. It is immediately on the institutions of politics, and it damages the society,” Mitchell said.

He said UHWI should now be treated as a proving ground for wider reform. The committee has recommended that the Government hire independent overseas expertise to steer institutional change at the teaching hospital, build out a formal implementation programme and enforce accountability for outcomes.

“We do not have, in my humble personal opinion, the level of expertise available here in Jamaica in relation to teaching hospitals and the management of teaching hospitals and the kind of unique animal that the University Hospital is,” he said.

Health Minister Dr Christopher Tufton backed that approach and said the Government plans to look abroad for suitable support. “I also take the position that I am not sure that that firm exists in Jamaica. So we will go to the international market to identify where that experience exists around teaching and service delivery hospitals, to guide the process over time,” Tufton said.

Mitchell maintained that reform should not stop at UHWI. “It’s a good point to start with the hospital, but it shouldn’t be the end of the road. It should be an example by which we pull up the standards of the other public bodies,” he said.