The Tribune

By NATARIO McKENZIE

Tribune Business Reporter

nmckenzie@tribunemedia.net

The government has been urged to shift state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to the private sector and remove their multi-million dollar losses from its balance sheet.

Robert Myers, pictured, the Organisation for Responsible Governance’s (ORG) principal, told Tribune Business: “If they don’t make money they should at least not lose money. It’s costing the taxpayers and it’s extremely unfortunate. It’s not going to help us get out of the fiscal crisis we are in.

“You could take significant losses off the table and make the government money, as opposed to losing money, by slowly moving those SOEs over to PPPs (public-private partnerships) or the private sector. What you would be doing is shifting the burden on to the private sector and taking the losses off the government balance sheet.”

During his mid-year budget statement last week, deputy prime minister K Peter Turnquest unveiled the Minnis administration’s plans to ensure that the government gets “value for money” from the near-$400m in annual subsidies it pumps into state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

Mr Turnquest lamented that while some $398m in recurrent spending was allocated to SOEs for the 2018-2019 fiscal year, an amount equal to 15.4 percent of its total outlay, there was no framework to properly monitor whether these entities are spending taxpayer monies wisely. He said the government will this month launch a project to evaluate its state-owned enterprises.

“We are encouraged to see they are actually going to try and figure that out, and we hope they will make that shift, which will have a pretty significant impact I assume on the budget. More than likely if they go to the private sector they will be more efficiently managed, and there would be an ease in the cost of doing business,” said Mr Myers.

“What we’re not talking about is the billions of dollars in unfunded pension liabilities. It just keeps growing. That is highly irregular and irresponsible from a management and fiscal standpoint.”