Request for your feedback

To provide feedback, email [email protected]. Feedback is requested by Friday 28 May 2021.

Tēnā koutou katoa.

I am pleased to present our Draft annual plan 2021/22 for your feedback.

My Office has a range of functions that help Parliament and the public hold public organisations to account for their use of public money. The purpose of our work is to improve trust in, and promote the value of, the public sector.

In the past year, the Covid-19 pandemic has reinforced the importance of our role and fundamentally changed the public sector operating environment.

At the same time, the important economic, social, and environmental issues that existed before Covid-19 – including inequality, housing, family violence and sexual violence, water, infrastructure, technology, and climate change – have not gone away. The need to address these issues remains.

These challenges are a constant reminder that public money needs to be effectively spent, and the public should know what it is spent on and the value received. Reporting how this money is spent, and whether this spending is improving outcomes for New Zealanders, should go hand in hand.

The work my Office does aims to assist public organisations to deliver services effectively and efficiently for New Zealanders and to publicly report their performance.

About 85% of our work consists of mandatory annual audits, three-yearly audits of councils’ long-term plans and consultation documents, and monitoring spending against appropriations through our Controller function.

The remainder of our work consists of:

• providing advice and support to select committees for effective parliamentary scrutiny;
• sector reports, where we look to provide insights into particular sectors;
• performance audits, where we look at the effectiveness of spending by public organisations;
• special studies, where we research and publish information about public sector performance and accountability; and
• inquiries, where we look at the appropriateness of public organisations’ behaviour and use of resources.

We report information from this work to help Parliament and the public hold public organisations to account for how they spend public money and what is achieved as a result.

I am seeking your feedback on our proposed annual work programme for 2021/22. Your views are sought on the coverage and focus of the work described in Part 4.

Much of our proposed work programme for 2021/22 builds on our 2020/21 work. We have also signalled work we are considering after 2021/22.

The response to, and recovery from, Covid-19 remains a key focus of our work. Other key themes in our work programme include:

• assessing how well the public sector is delivering on improving outcomes for New Zealanders;
• strengthening integrity systems in the public sector;
• developing further good practice guidance to help improve public sector performance and supporting audit and risk committees;
• building on our previous work on public accountability, government investments, and well-being;
• our regular sector reports and Controller activities; and
• following up on previous performance audits.

We also expect to complete a range of inquiry work. However, because this is largely demand driven, it is difficult to plan for.

Our work programme allows for the fact that the environment we operate in will continue to change. We therefore need to retain the agility to respond to unexpected events. We might also make changes to our draft work programme as my Office completes its wider business planning process during May, before publication of our final annual plan.

Seeking your views on our work programme helps us to understand what is most important to you and where we can make the biggest contribution to improving scrutiny of government and the public sector. Your feedback is important to our completion of the annual plan, which we will present to Parliament at the end of June 2021.

Feedback is requested by Friday 28 May 2021. I look forward to receiving your feedback as we finalise our annual plan for 2021/22.

Nāku noa, nā

John Ryan
Controller and Auditor-General

28 April 2021