Our draft annual plan: we want your feedback!
We’ve spent the last few months auditing local authorities’ consultation documents and long-term plans – these are the documents that local authorities use to consult with their communities about how they’re planning for the future. We’re also getting ready for the arrival of the next Controller and Auditor-General.
This week, we published our draft annual plan. Every year our Office is required to prepare and publish a draft annual plan that describes the Auditor-General’s proposed work programme. Our latest draft annual plan was presented to the House of Representatives this week, which means it’s now Parliament’s and your chance to provide us with feedback on what we are planning to do over the next year and beyond.
If you’ve read one of our annual plans before, there will be some material in our draft plan that looks familiar. That’s because 90% of the work we do is our annual audits of about 3600 organisations in the public sector (from schools to government departments). It’s our “business as usual” work, so to speak.
The other 10% is our discretionary work. This is work – such as our performance audits – that differs from year to year and looks at specific topics and issues. We group this work into six categories:
- theme-based work;
- multi-year programmes on significant issues;
- stand-alone work on significant issues;
- sharing good practice;
- sector-based reporting; and
- thought leadership.
Over the last few years, we’ve taken a theme-based approach to make the most of our unique view of the entire public sector, which allows us to identify common issues and challenges. Our previous work programme themes have included the future needs of New Zealand, service delivery, governance and accountability, and investment and asset management. Once we’ve completed our work under each theme, we publish a “reflections” report that bring together our findings from that work. You can read our previous reflections reports on our website.
The theme that we’ve proposed for 2018/19 and the following years is procurement. In our draft annual plan, we’ve set out a programme of work that will examine the governance, management, and effectiveness of procurement activity in the public sector. It’s a theme that affects all public sector organisations because they rely on procuring goods and services in order to function and deliver essential services to New Zealanders.
We want to know what you think about our proposed work programme. Have a look at our draft annual plan and send us your feedback by Friday 1 June 2018. You can do this by:
- posting a comment below;
- filling out the feedback form on our website; or
- emailing us.
We’re keen to get your views to ensure that the work we carry out is relevant, and to ensure that the public sector continues to achieve positive change for all New Zealanders. We’ll consider all the feedback we receive and, where appropriate, incorporate it into our final annual plan, which will be published by the end of June.