Elected parish councils are one of the options as Government conducts a review on whether to revive or scrap Bermuda's second tier of Government.

The councils have been under fire in recent years from Auditor General Larry Dennis who has been angered over poor bookkeeping.

Culture and Social Rehabilitation Minister Dale Butler told The Royal Gazette that meetings would being held with the parish councils and their communities in January.

"It may end up with elected parish councils as opposed to appointed parish councils."

The Progressive Labour Party has promised to move on the proposal since it first came to power in the 1998 General Election.

Mr. Butler said his own view was that elected councils would allow the locals a say in who they want and would give the councillors more responsibility.

"They would know they have been voted in by a large number of people and not just selected by a Minister so I think it would be a very good thing."

But he said it could be two years before the parish councils' law was changed. "They may be given a minor budget to do minor repairs or help seniors or schools or whatever."

Only Warwick parish council gets direct funding from the Government for its rest home. Most councils have given up responsibility for rest homes which Mr. Butler welcomed.

However some parishes have rental income. "Some of them struggle to find things to spend the money on."

That too could be tackled with widened responsibility said Mr. Butler, although he didn't rule out scraping parish councils if there was no interest.

"We will listen to see what the public would like to see, I am not going to give them a template. If the public have no idea we are going to have to make a decision, either to abandon them or to give them certain tasks that we feel people in the community should be doing.

"We can't make that decision until we have those meetings.

"You also have a couple of generations who don't have a clue about parish councils, they need to be informed as well."

Parish councils have also been told to submit all financial records and minutes for review by a Government accountant following Mr. Dennis' complaints about problems in financial reporting.

Mr. Butler told the House on Friday that he took the criticisms seriously.

Once a Government accountant has looked at the records they will be prepared for submission to the Auditor General.

Mr. Butler also said parish councils' coordinator Ottiwell Simmons will be running three workshops for parish councils involving a qualified accountant focusing on record keeping and the preparation of financial statements.

Government is moving away from appointing councils on an annual basis and back to three-year appointments on a rolling basis to ensure continuity in bookkeeping, said Mr. Butler.

"I think 90 percent of parish councils have send all the books that they have and we are going to do our own internal review and then pass them on to the Auditor General."

In his annual report released this summer, Mr. Dennis called for the Pembroke parish council to be scrapped and others were warned after he lost patience with their lack of fiscal accountability.

At that stage none of the parishes had issued audited financial statements for the year ending March 2007 while only Paget and Smith's issued audited statements for 2006.

Minister Butler also revealed on Friday that 60 people had volunteered to work on a homeless advisory council to develop a strategic plan to alleviate the problem.

A shortlist is being worked on ahead of a possible January start.