US President Barack Obama has found a potential Ambassador for this country almost one year after the departure of Dr Roy Austin-whose tenure has been criticised in a US State Department report.

Dr Austin’s tour of duty ended last January after eight years. He was appointed by former US president George W Bush.

Obama has announced his intention to nominate Beatrice W Welters as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the US, according to a White House press statement.

Welter is founder president and chairman of the AnBryce Foundation, an educational charity. She will face the problems highlighted in a report done by the Office of Inspector General on the US Embassy in Port of Spain between January 26 and February 11 this year, days after Dr Austin left the posting.

The report, published on the US State Department’s website, is described as ’Sensitive but Unclassified’.

The report describes the problems at the Embassy as ’systematic and endemic-almost beyond the ability of anyone, including the newly-elevated charge d’affaires, to remedy’.

The current acting charge d’affaires is Len Kusnitz.

Asked whether the report was the reason for the delay in appointing a new ambassador, Alice W Borrell, the US Embassy’s public affairs specialist, said the embassy’s public affairs officer, Matthew Cassetta, would be unable to respond until Monday as he had already left office for the day.

The report states, ’The charge d’affaires is atop a mission lacking cohesion, in part because of its sprawling physical facilities and the former ambassador’s distaste for traditional lines of authority-conditions also noted in the 2003 inspection.’

The report states that in 2003 when the inspection team came to Port of Spain, it highlighted the Ambassador’s hands-on role in personnel matters, which included the hiring of local employees.

Ambassador Austin was advised to desist from the activity that undercut the embassy’s supervisory officers.

’The Ambassador did not take this action,’ the report states.

The report added that in 2009, there was ’palpable tension’ existing between the American and local employees, made worse by Austin’s ’ill considered, semi-public criticism of his consuls, his management officer and even his deputy chief of missions’.

It also stated that raising the morale of local staff while toning down the local employees’ inflated sense of mission role posed a further challenge, since Austin had empowered local staff ’explicitly or implicitly’.