No ‘sugar coating’ sour report on NPDC
An independent auditor has found the way New Plymouth District Council manages its contractors to be significantly poor, inconsistent, open to potential fraud, and lacking basic checks.
The report, tabled at Tuesday’s Finance, Audit and Risk Committee, identified five major high risks which the council needed to address as quickly as possible.
Commissioned under the New Plymouth District Council (NPDC) internal audit plan, Deloitte’s David Seath said the council was unable even to provide him with a full list of contractors being used at the time of the audit.
Overall, NPDC received the lowest rating the auditor could give, after he found that ‘‘inconsistent and inadequate’’ processes were in place, alongside a lack of formalised health and safety inductions, while some contractors were left active in pay systems after their contracts had expired.
Seath also found a lack of rationales behind some hourly rates that were being paid, while half of a sample of contractors he investigated did not have a current contract in place.
There was also a ‘‘lack of scrutiny’’ and ‘‘no guidelines’’ in place to govern the renewal of contractor agreements.
‘‘You can’t sugar coat it – it doesn’t make good reading at all,’’ Seath said. ‘‘It’s not often we give councils a one out of five rating.’’
NPDC chief executive Craig Stevenson said that while there had been immediate action to fix some of the problems highlighted, the council was still putting an ‘‘action plan’’ in place, which would take some time.
‘‘I’m absolutely committed to make sure we can close down the holes,’’ he said.
However, mayor Neil Holdom was sceptical about how quickly management could work to address the issues, which he said were more ‘‘cavernous’’ than hole-like.
Stevenson then wanted to make it clear to the committee that the audit did not include the council’s major external contractors like Downer, but instead internal contractors hired to supplement existing staff.
Nevertheless, committee deputy chair Adrienne YoungCooper – who has been the chairwoman of Housing NZ, Homes, Land and Communities, a director at Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency, and deputy chair of the Auckland Regional Transport Authority – said she
had never seen an internal audit that ‘‘contains so much red’’.
She asked Stevenson to investigate the value of using so many contractors.
Stevenson said it was extremely difficult not to use a high number of contractors to fulfil the council’s work obligations, given how much in demand skilled staff were across the country.
Despite those issues, a number of councillors raised concerns about the report and how long some practices had been going on for.
‘‘It’s been an issue since 2015,’’ Dave Bublitz said. ‘‘It seems very little has been done to address it.’’