Title: A Modernization Journey: How the Jamaican National Land Agency Transformed
their Estate Management System to Sustain Revenue & Improve Transparency
Author: Peter Baker, Manager Property Services, Estates Management Division, Jamaica
NLA & Christopher Barlow, Director, Strategic Relations and Communications,
Thomson Reuters
The Estate Management Division, as part of the Jamaican National Land Agency (NLA),
manages some 40,000 parcels of lands owned by the Commissioner of Land, or
approximately 6% of all parcels on the island. The Estates Management Division of the
NLA is responsible for this portfolio – the largest single land portfolio for the island. This
includes forest, mineral, land settlements, and Crown lands.
Administrative responsibilities include acquiring (by way of lease or compulsory
acquisition) and divesting (by way of lease, sale, license, easement, or granting
possession) lands. Managing lands rights, restrictions, and responsibilities requires that
the Estates Management Division process some 60 distinct transactions and 46
workflows to properly administer this information.
The Estate Management Division is charged with ensuring that properties under its
portfolio are inventoried by both the location by the occupation of properties; its mode of
divestment; the existing and proposed use of the land; and also for collecting revenues
from sales and leases on these properties.
The 40,000 parcels managed in the inventory include settlement schemes with some that
came into effect from as early as the 1940s. The archive – the memory bank for all land
transactions, has some 38,000 files with an average of 150 pages of transactional
documents per file. There were concerns as to how secure the paper records were,
specifically as paper documents are prone to decay in the tropical Jamaican climate.
Beginning in November 2010 the Jamaican NLA embarked on a modernization project to
transform their paper based manual system into a fully digital transactional system. The
project received funding from the European Union, and Thomson Reuters was contracted
to provide the information system – the Aumentum software platform.
The objectives of the project were to improve customer services for the public and also
for the government, such as by reducing the time required to perform searches on specific
lands and to reduce transaction processing times. Additionally the paper-based archive
was severely inefficient in allowing the government to quickly and accurately create
reports, such as on total acreage in management for a Parish – as an example, either for
the NLAs executive management team or for the Prime Minister’s Cabinet, including the
Minister of Water, Environment, Land and Climate Change who is responsible for policy
oversight of the NLA.
Additionally, the NLA sought to integrate the estate management function with the new
fully digital land registry system – the Thomson Reuters Aumentum platform, and also
the surveying and mapping department’s Parcel Data Management System (GIS).
Efficiency gains from this integration were expected to allow for greater and faster
processing of information and importantly improved efficiency across the agency and for
stakeholders (citizens, banks, real estate developers, and industry groups). The NLA
wanted to scale its existing digital infrastructure.
The installation of the system was complete in 2013, and through 2014 the scanning of
the paper archive continued with a full completion date expected by mid-2015.
The NLA has focused, in particular, on the use of the Estate Management System (EMS)
to improve revenue and fee collection for the government. The Estates Management
Division manages and administers 500 different leases on government lands for which
they collect surface rental payments. This includes 25 mineral leases, for which they
collect royalty payments on minerals extracted – an example being the percentage of the
value from bauxite, a common mineral in Jamaica.
The NLA charges fees to the parties leasing properties and also to the Ministry of
Finance. Importantly, the Minister of Finance receives all lease and mineral royalty
revenues, and in the case of mineral value, the Ministry of Mines and Geology collects
additional royalty revenue.
In Jamaica, a mining concession and license cannot be granted on public lands unless the
transaction (lease agreement) is processed and recorded by the Estates Management
division of the NLA. The land information administered and managed by the NLA is,
therefore, critical for the government to collect on this important revenue source and
utilize land as a public asset.
An issue with the paper-based manual system was the difficulty in tracking lease
payments billed versus what was collected. In some cases, lands rents were not properly
billed, and in many cases the collection of rents lapsed. This resulted in lost revenue for
the government of Jamaica.
This paper and presentation will detail the financial gains from the institution of a new
estates management information system for the Jamaican NLA. Specifically, the paper
will detail the total fees collected by the agency before the modernization and also post
modernization, and will examine revenue lease and royalty revenues generated. As the
digital archive is nearing completion, the paper will also model the expected revenue
gains per year from collecting rents in arrear and also finding lands that rents have not
been collected for.
This is an important paper as it demonstrates how such a modernization projects can aid
in the sustainability of an agency, such as the NLA, by recouping an investment in
technology modernization, but more importantly derive substantial and multi-faceted
benefits for the government as a whole. Additionally, the project demonstrates how
greater transparency in the management of public (Crown) lands may be achieved in a
span of years. This has resulted in improved processing, searching, and also reporting for
the people, for stakeholders, and for the government.
Lessons learned from Jamaica can be well shared with other countries and governments
seeking to effectively manage while fairly and responsibility utilizing important natural
resources.