Forget The K185,000. Where Is The K2.7 Million?

by Michael J. Passingan

In July, the owner of a private security firm was charged over the disappearance of cash belonging to the Climate Change Development Authority. The charge is before the courts and the presumption of innocence stands. What does not require a verdict is the question of how a state agency ended up moving public revenue around Port Moresby in the back of someone's vehicle in 2026.

Environment, Conservation and Climate Change Minister John Kaupa now wants an investigation. He has also ordered an urgent review of the administration and collection of roughly K2.7 million taken at Jacksons since late 2025. That second figure is the one that should worry people. The K185,000 is a theft. The K2.7 million is a system — and nobody has yet demonstrated in public that a single kina of it landed where the law says it should.

Kaupa's prescription is correct and therefore embarrassing. Any future mechanism, he says, must be non-cash, auditable, and integrated with established government revenue systems: built into airline tickets, or into visa processing. Every one of those controls was available in 2025. None of them is novel. None is expensive. The CCDA chose a design in which strangers with buckets intercept tourists at a departure gate, and it chose that design over the boring alternative of a line item on a ticket that reconciles itself.

The suspension of the K50 levy arrived only after sustained criticism. Acting managing director Deborah Sungi frames the pause as a transition and review, intended to make collection more efficient, transparent and responsive to stakeholders. That language is doing an enormous amount of work. The Tourism Promotion Authority and industry bodies have said for months that the fee damages visitor perceptions and was imposed without coordination. They were ignored until a theft made ignoring them impossible. Reform did not come from oversight. It came from humiliation.

Then there is the procurement. The CCDA says it opened its own administrative inquiry into how the security firm came to be engaged, that the inquiry is finished, and that the report sits in its final stages before findings are released. Reports in final stages have a way of remaining in final stages. Three questions decide whether this one is real: Who selected the contractor, and on whose authority? Was the engagement competitively tendered, and does the file exist? What were the reconciliation and banking requirements in the contract, and who signed off on the months in which they were not met?

An agency investigating its own procurement is not an investigation. It is a draft. If the K2.7 million cannot be reconciled to the toea, the theft was not the failure. It was the receipt.
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