As part of the new stamp she wants to give the Office of the Comptroller, Carmen Vega Fournier anticipated that she will advocate for the oversight agency to have greater powers, by law, allowing it to impose fines and penalties following audits.
“I would like us to be able to impose penalties and fines. That is starting right there,” said the woman who until a week ago was president of the Economic Development Bank (BDE), in her first interview with El Nuevo Día.
Vega Fournier, who is an attorney and certified public accountant, answered in the affirmative when asked whether she would go to the Legislature in search of more powers for the Office of the Comptroller; and revealed that she has already ordered an evaluation of whether, under the agency's organic act, as amended, she can “impose some penalty.”
She added that she has already met with the inspector general of Puerto Rico, Ivelisse Torres Rivera, to “join forces” in order to combat corruption and, later on, sign a memorandum of understanding. As part of that meeting, she confirmed that the organic act of the Office of the Inspector General, from 2019, grants that entity more powers than those held by the Office of the Comptroller, whose law dates from 1952.
She likewise emphasized that she will promote education and sound public administration; and urged government employees, or “anyone,” to report acts of corruption, anonymously, directly to her, but with documents or evidence in hand.
According to Vega Fournier, addressing complaints in that way would help combat corruption more quickly. Along those lines, she promised to reduce the time in which audits are conducted, which today – she said – ranges between one year and 700 days.
“In other words, there's like no sense of urgency. That urgency, well… it has to be improved. But, certainly, 700 days is not (a term) acceptable,” she stated.
“And we are not going to measure the effort or the time in months, we are going to measure it in hours. Why? Because it's not the same to say ‘I'm going to take a month'; a month is 30 days and, when we look, those 30 days are not workdays. So we have to drop that vision of calendar days. The time is going to be reduced,” she insisted.
She did not, however, want to estimate how long audits would take going forward, because everything will depend on the complexity of the work or the audited place, whether an agency or municipality.
“Another thing we also want to emphasize is that the employees themselves speak up. They know what is happening, and they, well, when one enters an audit, you do the analysis, there may be things you don't see, or you see them five or six months later, versus if we have these employees, who are Puerto Ricans, who are public employees, who know what is happening in their agency, well, look, let them speak,” she asserted.
“I already gave out a phone number… It's a phone number that only I am going to answer, and we are going to guarantee them 100% anonymity and 100% confidentiality. And let them give us the evidence. That is, we are not going to put your name, or anything. You give me the documents; I am not going to reveal the sources, we simply need the information. And then we speed things up a lot more,” she added, from a conference room of the Office of the Comptroller, in Hato Rey, which has the photos of the nine comptrollers who preceded her, including the most recent, Yesmín Valdivieso.
Vega Fournier made clear that she will receive anonymous complaints, “but not without documentation” to avoid, “for example, what they did to me: a letter that has no basis whatsoever.” She referred to the fact that, while she was being evaluated in public hearings, she was accused, under anonymity, of administrative mismanagement at the BDE.
She rejected, in passing, that her position is contrary to the Anti-Corruption Code, which protects any person who, under anonymity, reports possible acts of corruption, or that her remarks have the effect of scaring off informants.
The Comptroller indicated that, although she did not have a formal transition process with Valdivieso, she received a report detailing that the agency has, for the current fiscal year, 518 employees. Of those, she said, 59 are trust employees and 48 “are filled with an annual salary of roughly $100,000.” On travel, $225,251 has been spent this year and, last fiscal year, the figure rose to $1,191,454.
Vega Fournier wants to retain the salary of the trust employees, but reduce them to 15 or 20. She will hire an external consulting firm to evaluate the classification and compensation plan, she announced.
She will also seek to save the $2,063,530 in rent for two buildings. She asked the Industrial Development Company to show her buildings she could use to unify all the employees. “The contract here runs until 2028. I hope that, by that same date, we can be out of the rent,” she noted from the facilities in Hato Rey.
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