New Zealand’s Auditor General John Ryan has excoriated the quality of reporting from government officials, saying they were producing “a load of rubbish.”
Speaking to Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Select Committee, he said poor performance meant ministers and the public were unable to judge whether taxes were being well spent and what agencies were achieving.
He said many agencies were “quite dismissive” of the potential to improve when the issue was raised with them, even as the public sector accounts for one-third of the New Zealand economy.
3 Major Failings
Three major failings were identified in the system: initiatives that were not meaningful or comprehensive; gaps in measuring what changes were being made; and poor measures for assessing the oversight and monitoring of departments.While an agency might be running an extensive program of work, they might report in detail on what they planned to do several years out.
“And that’s good internal monitoring, but what the public really wants to know is, what outcomes they’re getting,” he explained. “Managing it on a daily, that’s much more of a management activity.”
He cited the Provincial Growth Fund as an example of significant spending with no clear outcomes.
The $3 billion fund was established by the Ardern Labour government as part of the price of obtaining support from NZ First.
The minor party’s minister, Shane Jones, was put in charge. The Office of the Auditor General found it lacked “full and relevant reporting about the nature and purpose of the full range of the Fund’s investments and the impact of those investments against the objectives set for the Fund when it was established.”
Updating actual performance against publicly stated targets was an important aspect of reporting, Mr. Ryan said. “Obviously, the public wants to know that agencies are managing big projects well.”
Laws Need to Be Updated for the 21st Century
But the public also needed to be able to see the broader picture: “What the ministry, or any ministry, is there to do; what they’re trying to achieve; how they’re going to go about it; what progress has been made; and ultimately, I think we need to know the connection between all of that and the $160 billion of taxpayer spending that goes on each year.”Mr. Ryan said there were probably “a range of reasons” why reporting fell short of the required standards, but that it had been a long-standing failing.
“The key issue, that I put in front of Parliament, is that I think it’s time for the law to be reviewed here.”
While there were good examples of accountability, they were often outside of the formal reporting system, he said.
“Unless the laws change—and I’m talking particularly about the Public Finance Act—agencies will [continue to be] given quite a lot of freedom about what they report and how they report. It [the Act] is 30 years old, it’s been amended probably over 30 times, and it needs to be tuned up for 21st century New Zealand, and a public that’s very interested in what they’re getting for their money.”
His recommendations for a rewrite of the Act would encompass ensuring that “every agency should be clear on its outcomes and then say how they’re going to go about it in their accountability document.
“They should be able to then report progress using metrics and other things to point to that. And I think all of that needs to be connected back to the $160 billion against which we can actually point to outcomes for the dollars we give the government to spend.”
