KEY POINTS:
A report into how Te Puni Kokiri (TPK) administers grants is extremely disturbing and provides a wake-up call, the Maori Party says.
The Controller and Auditor-General report into TPK, the Maori Development Department, has found problems with record-keeping, monitoring and evaluation.
The report said it was hard in some cases to tell if monitoring was being done because of poor paperwork; that in some cases funding was paid out before contracts were signed and that often recipients did not provide progress reports.
There was "little evidence" to show that TPK evaluated individual projects to see what impact they had.
The report said approval processes were detailed but did not always check the applicants' viability or possible conflicts of interest.
Maori Party MP Te Ururoa Flavell said TPK needed to improve its act.
"It is extremely disturbing to learn of the general sloppiness and legal risk that appears to have existed in this agency over the period of this review," he said.
Mr Flavell said the Maori Party had previously expressed concern the department had not spent its budget and did not believe it was fulfilling its roles.
"Te Puni Kokiri was established with three core functions - a policy advice role, a monitoring role and a role of administering funding for community development," he said.
"It is now part of the record that Te Puni Kokiri has been progressively running down its monitoring function - and this latest report demonstrates the devastating impact that the dwindling emphasis has had upon outcomes."
He called on the department to "pull out all the stops" to deliver its core roles. "This report is yet another wake-up call for both the ministry and its minister."
The report made several recommendations, including that TPK:
* Create proposal templates to encourage applicants to focus on key criteria
* Prepare assessment templates for recording the information required to thoroughly assess funding applications;
* Ensure that the assessment templates are flexible enough for assessments to reflect the value and size of individual projects;
* Document regular monitoring visits using standardised templates to ensure that all the required monitoring information is regularly collected and recorded;
* Provide funding for all its programmes in instalments spread throughout the term of contracts and clearly linked to the delivery of project milestones and reporting requirements;
* Comply with its internal process requirements to ensure that contracts are signed only after legal clearance and before the start of the funded activity;
* Introduce templates to assess and record the progress of funded projects against contract milestones, including a comparison of actual and budgeted expenditure.
- NZPA
