EDITORIAL - Growing old waiting on the AGD

The message could hardly be clearer: don't die intestate. If you do, it's likely that the Administrator General's Department, which is the government office that looks about the estates of people who die without leaving wills, will make so much of a mess of things that even after three generations, nothing will be sorted out. By that time, all potential beneficiaries are likely to be dead, too.

Should this observation seem a lark, you need only pay attention to the latest report on government agencies by the auditor general, many of whose findings have been recently highlighted and reviewed by this newspaper's analyst, A.C. Count. For instance, of the 8,000 cases being managed by the Administrator General's Department a year ago, the owners of half of them had been dead for between two decades and up 70 years, or nearly the expected lifetime of the average Jamaican.

But it is not just that even after these generations have passed that the Administrator General's Department doesn't fulfil its obligations to beneficiaries and creditors. The agency, too, is unlikely, at any point, to be able to provide an up-to-date account of any estate.

As A.C. Count noted in a report last Sunday, approximately 1,000 estate accounts, which translate to 12.5 per cent of all of those being managed by the department, were in arrears by as much as three years. And in seven of every 10 dwellings managed by the department, tenants were in arrears for rent periods of up to a decade. That's not all. There is no attempt to evict the recalcitrant tenants.

INSUFFICIENCY OF RESOURCES

Obviously, this horrible state of affairs didn't develop overnight and has to do, in part, with the insufficiency of resources the Government allocates to the department. In Jamaica's current economic circumstance, the Administrator General's Department will not get all the funding it needs. We, nonetheless, believe that, with greater focus and deliberate effort, the department can do better with what is available. The better answer, though, may lie in privatising of the management of agency on a model that links returns to the efficiency of its operation.

In the meantime, it makes sense to complete even a drugstore-bought will, lest a newborn intended beneficiary grows old and grey and expires his lifespan waiting on the Administrator General's Department.

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