General secretary of Jamaica Football Federation (JFF) Dennis Chung says he is quietly confident that a special audit, scheduled to be conducted on the organisation next month, will bear fruit and allow FIFA to lift the restricted finances imposed on the Administration.

Chung explained that the restriction was imposed on the JFF five years ago. Since then, his organisation has been working assiduously to ensure its financial records are clean and audited statements are delivered on time. The restrictions were implemented as FIFA oversaw changes to the JFF’s governance and financial structures. Under this structure, the JFF receives limited funding from FIFA with monies also disbursed in smaller increments.

“We are confident about it, and we are pressing ahead and making some improvements to our governance procedure and financial governance that we have,” Chung told the Jamaica Observer. “We have good financial records in place and we have been doing well, in terms of a surplus point of view.”

“We have a proper budget in place and we just finalised and did a selection on a travel procurement policy, which was the only thing that was causing a problem because of the nature of travelling in the Caribbean. But we are pretty confident that when we have the auditing in February, we should be okay with it,” Chung stated.

Chung, a well-respected financial mind, noted that FIFA remains the number-one financial source for the JFF, followed by Adidas, then corporate sponsors, and the Government. He emphasised that the last financial audit, conducted by FIFA last year, was very successful and he is optimistic that next month’s audit will also yield positive results for the JFF.

“The last audit was in June, which was a full-year audit, but this audit in February is going to be a special audit and it is going to focus on six months because they are trying to do a recommendation for FIFA’s audit committee for us,” Chung stated. “Based on how the audit goes, they will make a recommendation to FIFA regarding our restricted funding status.

“It [restricted finances] has been there for a little while, and we had to clean up some things because the financial records were not properly in place, and the audited financial statements were not being delivered on time,” he underscored.

Chung added: “There were issues with financial governance, but all of that is cleared up now. The only thing coming out of the last financial audit was the travel procurement, and hopefully, that is good now because we have been working with FIFA on it. We expect that this year we will come off restricted funding.”