While admitting that things are far from perfect in certain regards, General Secretary Dennis Chung insists that the Jamaica Football Federation (JFF) has made significant strides in an attempt to get its house in order to move away from the negativity that often overshadowed the country’s footballing success.

Chung’s assertions came as he provided the latest update of the governing football body’s finances, delivering on a promise to increase transparency and accountability at an organisation plagued by allegations of corruption and mismanagement.

“I've been here for a few months now, so I think it's timely to give an update as to where we are, what challenges we are still faced with and what progress has been made in relation to some of the things that I committed to at the start of my tenure here because I think that accountability is very important,” Chung told journalists during a press conference at the JFF’s St Lucia Avenue base.

On that note, Chung, revealed that the JFF finances, for the first time in a long time, reflected an $11 million surplus at the end of July, which he believes is testament to progress made.

“When we come in November one of the things, I said is that we need to recognize that changing and developing our product doesn't happen overnight, we're going to have hiccups. We've had some hiccups, but what we have attempted to do, which I think we have been successful in some respects, is to fix the brand,” Chung shared.

“You can’t drive the car until the car is fixed. The engine has to be fixed and, therefore, over the past few months we’ve been looking at the strategies for fixing the product because you can’t sell a product unless it’s fixed. So, recently, we’ve been getting in sponsors and the reason why we’ve been able to get sponsors is because we fixed the product that’s there,” he added.

That said, Chung addressed two widely circulated issues that he said were a misrepresentation of the facts aimed at condemning the Michael Ricketts-led administration. One of those issues involves a $107 million debt to the Tax Administration Jamaica (TAJ), while the other surrounds another $30 million missing from the JFF coffers.

“The JFF unlike many organisations, have a Tax Compliant Certificate and we not only got it, but we updated and renewed it. That $107 million owed to TAJ is related to penalties and interest coming from as far back as before 2017.

“Last year we went into negotiations with the tax authority, and we paid off all the principals outstanding. The discussion at the time was, ‘show us that you’re keeping up to date with your payments’, which we did, and then by March we were able to apply for a write-off of the penalties and interest,” Chung, who is also an accountant explained.

He continued: “The other thing I saw people saying that $30 million is missing that was classified as miscellaneous, but that $30 million came up because when the audit was done, and the issue was that $30 million was not classified properly to the line item.

“I am an accountant, I know that many companies have that issue with their auditors, so we reclassified it and everything was classified successfully and we got the audit issued by the auditors. So that implication that there is money missing, there is no money missing, it was just how it was accounted for and then it was classified, so for me, where we are coming from is significant in terms of the accomplishment.

Finally, Chung is cognizant that they still have much more to do to achieve the level of comfort where trust in the JFF and, by extension, sustainable development of the country’s football is concerned.

“We would not have got the sponsorships if we did not fix the product. Now we are not at the level that we want yet, because we still have not finished fixing the product. But we've gone a far away in making inroads,” the general secretary ended.