Transport regulator reacts to audit report
Recommendations 'are standard practice'
The recommendations of a very critical audit report on the transport authority have already become standard practice, the regulator said yesterday in its first public reaction.
The report was drawn up by the Auditor General and referred to the transport authority's mis-management of road construction projects partly funded by the Fifth Italo-Maltese Financial Protocol.
According to the report released last week, the transport regulator (ADT) ignored ministerial in-structions to stick to the available budget, adopted unorth-odox payment processes and appointed supervisors nominated by the contractors.
It was the supervisor who suggested modifications, decided on whether to proceed with them and determined, to a large extent, their cost. In the end, the "Italian" roads budget was exceeded by €8 million in spite of a contingency of 48 per cent in the original budget allocations for any unforeseen expenditure.
The report is highly critical of the ADT's control mechanisms, or lack of them. The Roads Ministry had issued specific instructions to the ADT to maintain its own (independent) system of checks and measurement of works. But the regulator did not abide by such instructions and put the onus of checks on the same supervisor.
The report added that when the National Audit Office requested access to relevant documentation maintained by the supervisors, this was not made available.
The ADT brushed aside the criticism yesterday, saying the report referredto projects under-taken in 2005 and earlier. All the recommendations made in the report were already standard practice in all road projects and had been introduced over the past four years since the completion of the Italian protocol projects in 2005.
"The ADT is continuously reviewing and updating its procedures and is planning to introduce more initiatives to ensure that works are carried out according to stipulated time-frames and works' method-statements by the contractors for all projects undertaken."
The procedure followed for the award of road contracts was through the issue of public competitive tenders by the Department of Contracts, which followed public procurement regulations. The contracted supervisors, being indepedent engineers with the responsibility of supervising the works, were appointed by the regulator through a separate tendering process managed by the De-partment of Contracts, the ADT said.