Public in the dark over annual report

TAXPAYERS are concerned about the Land Transport Authority’s (LTA) failure to make its annual report public for the past 10 years.

Public service drivers, who are members of the Lautoka Viti Minibus Association and the Fiji Zone Taxi Association raised this at a public consultation held in the West yesterday.

“As taxpayers of the country, we should be concerned that 10 years of reports are unavailable for public consumption by the LTA,” representative Shalesh Naidu said.

“We couldn’t open the PDF file, but we presume it contains annual reports containing details of the financial statements of the LTA.

“It also appeared that the last report uploaded on the website is for 2012 and the Parliament website shows that the 2016-2017 annual report was presented to Parliament in 2022.”

Mr Naidu said the portal also had several documents available for download, however, he couldn’t do so, and that the documents available online did not have dates to determine which were the latest and which were the older ones.

He suggested to the authorities concerned to make available effective dates of the fees and legal notice preferences for user consumption. “Most documents loaded in their portal are outdated. The last newsletter is dated 2016 and the last magazine is dated 2018.

“The online portal has 43 documents loaded on the web page, and when I attempted to load the form rental permit (LR) New, the system did not respond.

“I sent a live chat message inquiring about the problem, and I did not get a response.”