The Food & Environmental Hygiene Department has accepted recommendations made by the Ombudsman on expired prosecution cases, and is working to improve the situation.

The Ombudsman's investigation report, published today, said the department dropped 33 summonses in the last three years as the statutory time limit for prosecution expired. Bringing information to court for these offences must be done within six months from the offence date. This statutory six-month limit is known as the "time-bar".

Two of the cases the Ombudsman studied were time-barred because the department misplaced the summons file. This was, however, not what the complainants were told.

In another case, the Ombudsman said that nowhere in the file had department staff indicated concern over the lack of evidence. However, the complainant was told the case had been dropped due to insufficient evidence. This was untrue and tantamount to giving knowingly-false information, or covering up their mistake through lies, which is more serious than the mistake itself, the Ombudsman added.

Advice accepted

In response, Acting Deputy Director of Food & Environmental Hygiene Rhonda Lo said the department has accepted the report's recommendations and is improving its procedures for handling prosecutions.

Ms Lo said that in the past three years, the department has handled 50,000 prosecution cases. Of them, only 33, or 0.07% of the total, were time barred.

"While we appreciate the heavy workload and work pressure faced by the staff in handling prosecution cases, the fact that prosecution has to be dropped because of exceeding the time-bar statutory requirement is unacceptable," she said.

"We conducted a preliminary review of the cases in question and have implemented a number of improvement measures to prevent recurrence of time-barred incidents."

Improvement measures

Measures taken include:

* strengthening internal communication and monitoring;

* the withdrawal of prosecution and time-barred cases will be personally reviewed and handled by directorate staff;

* legal advice will be sought in cases involving unauthorised alteration of premises;

* time-bar issues will be added to training and refresher courses;

* strengthened liaison with the Government Laboratory for close monitoring of food tests; and,

* more staff will expedite the testing of food samples.