Santo Domingo.- The nine members of the Chamber of Accounts handed over checks totaling RD$563,947.20 each yesterday, paying back the Christmas salaries and bonuses they had awarded themselves despite not having served the requisite minimum three months in post.

The checks totaled RD$5,075,524.80 and were received by the Chamber’s financial director, Ana María Arias, who deposited them in the institution’s current account number 010-251749-5 at the Banco de Reservas.

Chamber of Accounts president Licelott Marte de Barrios assured the public that if this was not enough for some sectors and they continued to call for the Chamber members’ resignation, the members were willing to submit themselves to political judicial process and be summoned by the National Congress.

"We are willing to discuss whatever they want us to talk about, but at this moment none of us have considered resigning because we don’t feel we have done anything that requires a resignation”, she stated.

Marte de Barrios said that all the state decentralized institutions and other government entities pay the Christmas salary and bonus to their employees. Critics had the right to demonstrate against this.

“If the choice was to pay back (the funds) we are doing so, now if after paying them back new avenues are opened and they want us to travel down them, we will have to do so”, she added.