With quiet efficiency and little fanfare, Sharon Crooks took on the arduous task as financial secretary in the Ministry of Finance and the Public Service in October.

The financial secretary is the only permanent secretary named in the Constitution of Jamaica and functionally holds a premier place in the civil service.

Crooks is not resting on her laurels, but is determined to lead a culture change.

"It is my intention, it is my dream, and it is my vision to reposition the Ministry of Finance and the Public Service," Crooks said. "This means that we are going to have to focus not only on the objectives of achieving sustainable growth, but we are going to have to do it while ensuring that we have a satisfied clientele. I intend to do this through the very people who are within the Ministry of Finance and the Public Service."

Career path

The experienced public servant is a graduate of the University of Technology (accounts and economics) with a master's in business administration from Nova South Eastern University in Florida. Prior to her appointment, Crooks served as head of the Financial Investigations Division, also within the Ministry of Finance.

Despite her relatively rapid rise to the civil head of the powerful finance ministry, Crooks' career path was not seamless. Nor was her upward mobi-lity without frustrating challenges.

With a rueful smile, Crooks says that she understands the career stumbling blocks in the public service for those who are qualified, motivated and raring to go but are handicapped by inexplicable challenges.

"I have started from the bottom, and I have reached to the top. I should probably say I have started at the bottom twice. I entered the public sector at a very junior level, as an auditor in the Income Tax Department, and I moved up through my work, until in 1999 when there was the merger of the revenue departments to form the Tax Administration, Audit and Assessment Department (TAAD). I had applied for a number of positions, but was not selected, even though my performance, supported by evaluations, indicated that I was among the top performers.

Reassigned

Fortitude and determination to prove her worth paid off. She was transferred to the Ministry of National Security, which was later merged with the justice ministry, and headed a team of forensic accountants in the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.

"As time went by and just when I thought that I had lost my first love, the Ministry of Finance and Planning, there was a merger of the Financial Crimes Unit and the Revenue Protection Division to form the Financial Investigations Division in the Ministry of Finance. As a result, I was reassigned to that ministry again in the Taxpayer Audit and Assessment Department.

"Not only had I come full circle, but I was once again relegated to the very bottom of my career path, a position lower than where I had started. My intention, my passion was to serve my country and, therefore, I turned my lemons into lemonade and so I became the best batcher," she reflected.

Deployment

It was a bitter pill to swallow for a top achiever with loads of institutional knowledge and experience to descend to the level of batcher, a relatively undemanding clerical position. However, her Christian convictions and love for country inspired her to persevere.

She explained, "You would be given a batch of tax returns and your job was to ensure that you affixed the right code, tied them with a string and ensured that the returns were batched with all the others and dispatched to the relevant area. I did all this while having a master's in business administration and having prior leadership of a significant unit, but I decided that this was my country and I was not leaving the service."

Hard work, persistence and integrity nudged her supervisors to recommend deployment elsewhere. As a result, she slowly moved up the ladder, taking up challenges in reconciling accounts and managing small and medium-size case teams. Success in those assignments opened doors, as she moved from Taxpayer Audit and Assessment to the Inland Revenue Department to work along with two Canadian consultants who requested an understudy. There, she also helped spearhead departmental restructuring.

"In that assignment, I was required to oversee the revenue inflows of all 29 collectorates and to see how best to restructure the operation, mostly focusing on the human resources to enhance the revenue and basically to increase outflows, and I spent a good 18 months to two years on that assignment," Crooks told The Sunday Gleaner.

"The consultants wrote an evaluation which I could say was the best evaluation I had ever received. It basically said that I was one of those employees who was being underutilised and that I should be placed at the most senior level within the Inland Revenue Department."

Reflecting on one of her major achievements prior to her current posting, Crooks recalled a special assignment given to her by the former director general of the Tax Administration Department to initiate a revenue-enhancement programme to close the budgetary gap. That programme was given a target of $5 billion. Crooks worked with a team led by Karab Damdar, technical adviser to the director general of tax administration, to lead a team of compliance officers and auditors to bring in the reve-nue. They were successful, surpassing the target by raking in $8 billion for that fiscal year.

Policymakers

"This achievement reinforced the view that I could play a more signifi-cant role within the ministry itself. This move provided me the opportunity to work along with the technocrats as well as with the policymakers," she said.

Commenting on the major fiscal challenges facing the country at this time, the financial secretary pointed to the economic climate and said that the current crisis would force the public and private sectors to be more disciplined and creative in raising revenue and tightening spending.

"Fiscal management has to be approached from two sides, not only from the side of expenditure, but from the side of revenue. In my role as financial secretary, I have the responsibility to ensure that all mini-stries, departments and agencies respect the budget process. So, one of my areas of focus, especially at this time when we are putting the supplementary figures together, will be to examine what are our priorities and to prioritise them in line with our resources," she emphasised.

Paradigm shift

The global economic slowdown will compound Jamaica's high public debt and lingering fiscal deficit, but Crooks said the dilemma could expedite the quest for public-sector modernisation and a paradigm shift in policy.

"I am not frightened by it, nor am I daunted by it. Rather, I see it as an opportunity to focus on some of the transformations that we need to make now as a public sector and in my mind, this situation will cause us to have to decide, willingly or unwillingly.

"We need to establish the optimal size of the public sector and how our human resources are deployed while ensuring that we have the right persons in the right jobs, doing the right tasks, with the right leaders to motivate them. So, I see it as an opportunity," she explained.

Crooks, the fourth of six child-ren, began her career as a teacher. She has been married for 20 years and is the mother of two children, ages 11 and eight.