Election Trial: Auditor’s Credentials Challenged as SOP Examination Comes Under Fire

Questions over what exactly constitutes a forensic audit of election results have emerged as a central issue in the trial arising from Guyana’s disputed 2020 General and Regional Elections, as defence attorneys challenge the credentials and scope of evidence being presented by forensic accounting consultant Terrence Jaskaran.

Jaskaran was accepted by Principal Magistrate Faith McGusty as an expert in forensic auditing despite objections from defence attorneys. But his testimony has also established important limitations on the nature of the examination he actually performed.

The witness has testified that his professional background is primarily in accounting, finance, auditing and forensic auditing. Jaskaran reportedly holds a bachelor’s degree in Accounting and Finance, an MBA, is a Fellow of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), a member of the Forensic Certified Public Accountant Society in the United States and a practising chartered accountant in Guyana. He has also said he has approximately 11 years of experience conducting forensic audits.

Those credentials establish professional experience in examining financial records, figures and data. The more difficult question raised during the trial, however, is whether that experience is equivalent to specialised expertise in forensically examining electoral documents and determining the validity, authenticity or provenance of Statements of Poll.

Defence attorney Eusi Anderson reportedly argued that there was a substantial distinction between accounting expertise and expertise in the administration and auditing of elections.

“I think it would be an enormous stretch to juxtapose the skills and experiences derived in looking at the balance sheets and data sets from a bank and compare them to an electoral process.”

Anderson further argued that Jaskaran had not demonstrated previous experience auditing elections or election results.

The distinction is significant because Jaskaran’s examination was not an investigation into how votes were cast or whether individual ballots were valid. His stated assignment was to tabulate figures contained in certified SOPs, compare them with Form 24 declarations and identify numerical variances.

Jaskaran testified that he entered the figures from the SOPs into Excel spreadsheets and compared the resulting totals with the figures appearing on Form 24 declarations. He identified major differences in Region Four, including a 20,243-vote variance involving the A Partnership for National Unity and Alliance for Change (APNU+AFC) between the certified SOP tally and the March 5 declaration.

But under cross-examination, Jaskaran acknowledged that determining the cause of the discrepancies or the integrity of the underlying documents was outside his assignment.

That limitation became particularly important when defence counsel questioned whether he had independently verified the integrity or chain of custody of election data and documents. Kaieteur News reported that Jaskaran acknowledged that he had not investigated the integrity of the election files provided to him and had not examined their cause and effect.

Jaskaran acknowledged having no training in election-related processes or in determining whether election materials supplied to him were “true and genuine.”

There is therefore an important evidentiary distinction: a spreadsheet comparison can establish that two sets of figures are different; it does not, by itself, establish why they are different.

The numerical discrepancies remain part of the prosecution’s evidence. But determining whether a variance resulted from fraud, clerical error, legitimate revision, improper tabulation, document alteration or another cause requires evidence beyond simply identifying the difference.

The court has already indicated that the evidentiary weight of Jaskaran’s report remains to be determined. Kaieteur News reported that Magistrate McGusty noted that the court must still consider the authenticity and credibility of the underlying documents.

Jaskaran has also faced questions about public political commentary. The magistrate admitted into evidence a social-media post in which he described APNU as a “clown show,” saying such public views could bear on the weight of his opinions.

The issue before the court, therefore, is not simply whether Jaskaran can add numbers. It is whether the scope of his expertise and the scope of the exercise he performed are sufficient to support the broader conclusions the prosecution seeks to draw from those numbers.

The trial continues.