1.  “Lead by example as anything less lacks credibility and respect”.

2. “Don’t do as I do – do as I say”.

It’s a sad reflection on our country when one of the Civil Service Departments in the Cayman Islands Government adopts Rule 2.  It is even worse when the Department is in charge of seeing companies in the private sector obey their rules but flagrantly fails to execute these same rules themselves.

The government department I am talking about is the Portfolio of the Civil Service (POCS) who, with the office of the Deputy Governor, withheld and partially withheld records from the Applicant, relating to the recruitment exercise resulting in the appointments of three Chief Officers.

Our Front Page story today (2) carries the Decision in full from the Information Commissioner’s Office (IOC) by Jennifer Dilbert in relation to a hearing after she ordered the records to be disclosed.  Her Decision contains damning criticisms of the record keeping and handling of the request by the authority.  There were also concerns from her about important records that should have been available and simply didn’t even exist!

Mrs. Dilbert said, “It is extraordinary that best practices in recruitment have not been followed in this case, by the very public authority that is responsible for enforcing these practices in other public authorities, and in relation to the recruitment of three very senior public officers.

“There were numerous problems with the handling of this request.  While POCS initially insisted that the seven pages of records supplied to the Applicant in the first instance constituted a full response, this is negated by the fact that numerous other responsive records were subsequently identified.”

She particularly slammed Ian Fenton, Chief Officer of the POCS, saying, “I find it interesting that Mr. Fenton can speak so strongly about the open and fair manner in which the Portfolio has operated, when in fact, at the outset, the minimum response was offered and it was only after the intervention of the ICO via mediation that additional records were forthcoming.”

One can only, once again, commend Jennifer Dilbert for her diligence in coming to her Decision.

Unfortunately, the authority has 45 calendar days to appeal the Decision to the Grand Court and the 30 day request for release of the documents stretches more often than not into 8 months plus.

If the Premier, McKeeva Bush, would take the bull by the horns and slash the Civil Service numbers leaving only the employees that actually do a decent and productive job, he wouldn’t have to resort to ruining our country by his income tax proposal on ex-pats.

Every tree and bush (no pun intended) has dead wood and needs pruning.  That has not happened for a very long time in Cayman’s Civil Service and its cloak of secrecy and withholding files (if there are any) and information gets worse – or is it only now coming to light as we have an Information Commissioner?

At least Mrs Dilbert adopts Rule 1.