NICHOLSON. the audit revealed significant financial irregularities

The Government has asked the auditor-general, Adrian Strachan, to probe the finances of the Legal Aid Office in Kingston in the face of either fraud or bureaucratic bungling in which some attorneys were apparently paid several times over for the same cases, the attorney-general, A J Nicholson, said yesterday.

Nicholson, who is also the justice minister, said that Strachan was asked to go into the Legal Aid Office after a recent internal audit showed that "the office is not being run properly".

"The audit revealed significant financial irregularities where over-payments and double payments have been discovered," Nicholson told members of the Cornwall Bar Association at a meeting in Trelawny called to discuss problems in the island's legal aid system. "An attorney will be paid this month for a case and two months' time he gets paid for the same case."
Nicholson named no names and did not indicate at what level the alleged cock-ups took place, and the head of the Legal Aid Office, Nancy Anderson, could not be contacted last night for comment.

But after yesterday's meeting, Clay Morgan, the president of the Cornwall Bar Association, which covers lawyers in the western end of the island, described Nicholson's allegations as "very serious ones".
"Anybody who is found to have committed a fraud on the system will have to bear the consequences," Morgan said.

A new legal aid process, guaranteeing a wider range of coverage for people with cases before the courts, was launched over two years ago after Parliament approved legislation that overhauled a system which was based largely on pro bono arrangements at legal aid clinics.
The Government put $40 million into the system, but earlier this year there were complaints that the system did not have sufficient money to meet its requirements and that people who could not afford fees were still being asked to pay.

It was recently reported that lawyers were owed over $30 million by the Government for services provided under the legal aid programme. It was the frequent claims by lawyers against the legal aid secretariat for outstanding debts and allegations that some attorneys were being favoured over others that prompted the audit, according to Nicholson.
Last week, Morgan said western Jamaica lawyers, owed up to $3 million, were refusing to take legal aid cases because of delays in payment.

Cornwall Bar Association members were also concerned over the way cases were being assigned.
Yesterday, Nicholson said that the internal audit, conducted between October and November, suggested an absence of finance management and "blatant breaches" of accepted principles of accountability.

"We have asked for verification of claims that are questionable - and there are questionable authentication of claims," the minister said.
In fact, Nicholson claimed that the cases irregularities were many.
"Not one, not two, or three or four - scores of attorneys have been paid double," he said.

Added Nicholson: "We found a situation in which an attorney visits a client at Hunts Bay on the same day he is visiting a client in Portmore and the same policeman who is stationed at Hunts Bay signed the (document)."
In the circumstance, said Nicholson, it was difficult for the authorities to determine what was really owed to lawyers for legal aid work.

"To say that it is over $30 million that is owed... we just can't take it like that," the attorney-general told the western Jamaica lawyers. "No, we can't do it, because bad things have happened in the system, so we have to deal with that."
Nicholson told the Sunday Observer that there was a possibility of Strachan ordering lawyers to pay back money. "He is the figure now that controls everything," he said.

Some of the lawyers with legitimate claims against the legal aid fund could be paid by yearend, but it was unlikely that all could get their money immediately, the attorney-general said.
"There is something in the budget, probably in the range of about $5 million or $7 million, that will be used to pay some of the attorneys, but I don't think we will be able to pay all," Nicholson said.

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