The importance of controls

By Peter Nicholl

The News published a story on March 16 headed ‘Audit rebuke for council’. Audit NZ had reviewed the spending controls of the Waipā District Council and found some areas that concerned them. The Cambridge News story obviously was of interest to readers as it was the second most viewed item on the paper’s website in the week after its publication.

Problems can occur in organisations where risk and spending controls are either absent or exist but are ignored or not taken seriously. It is not that long ago that serious breaches occurred in the Waikato District Health Board. More recently, a senior council executive of the Westland District Council was found guilty of taking bribes in relation to procurement contracts.

The first thing that can be said about the Audit Department’s rebukes of the Waipā District Council is that most of the breaches they found were not that serious. For example, one case was that expenses that were justified were signed off by the wrong person.

But another breach was that the information on the register of councillors’ interests had some gaps. That surprised and disappointed me. It is less than a year ago that the Cambridge News uncovered that one councillor was a shareholder in a Maungatautari quarry that had been operating for five years but had never applied for a resource consent. They only applied for consent after the Cambridge News story.

Given this major breach occurred less than a year ago, I would have thought that every Waipā councillor would have been careful to ensure they made full disclosures on the