SHEFA’s ‘incoherent’ response frustrates OPA

The Office of the Public Auditor has lashed at the administrators of the Saipan Higher Education Financial Assistance for what OPA described as their incoherent response to allegations against the program.

Public Auditor Michael S. Sablan said he was disappointed and frustrated with SHEFA’s “unresponsive, unintelligible and professionally unacceptable” response to the OPA review of the scholarship agency.

The SHEFA board of directors recently issued a 46-page reply to OPA’s findings that the board had misused public funds through questionable hiring and improper payments to board members. In its response, the SHEFA board said the agency had consistently kept its budget in the black. But OPA’s allegations were not addressed in specific terms.

OPA rejected SHEFA’s response, saying it would not waste any more time and resources trying to interpret the incoherent text.

“The submission fails to address, with any substance or sincerity, the concerns raised in the OPA review. It instead embarks on a specious 46-page tirade, so poorly written and teeming with rhetorical non-sense, grammatical errors, and run-on sentences that gleaning any actual meaning from its text is difficult, if not impossible. Indeed, the submission raises further concerns if government resources were expended in its creation,” Sablan said.

He cited randomly selected examples of incoherent writing found in SHEFA’s response. One example, which was meant to address OPA’s allegation about the SHEFA contractors’ seemingly repetitive tasks, reads as follows:

“Moreover, what may seem at first blush to be unmeritorious engagement in seemingly duplicative and repetitive task orders would, upon closer scrutiny, prevail as a necessary antecedent in facilitating program growth, development, renewal and expansion in order that SHEFA becomes viable and a sustainable program, just as any new and emerging program would require, no matter the modality of delivery—whether performed or ascribed by negotiated deliverables by the governing board or by prescriptive and ministerial list of position description assigned a civil servant, the latter proposition ill advised given the uncertain beginning of and externally induced instability sown into the program, not to mention the external tinkering with SHEFA has been subjected to since 2006 to this day as in the extant case.”

Sablan said SHEFA had an additional 15 days to submit a response that addresses the concerns raised in the OPA review and conforms to minimum standards of professional correspondence.