Exclusive — Te Reo Marama and Maori Smoking — Troughing 102

Yes­ter­day I blogged about the exces­sive travel and globe trot­ting to exotic place that Shane Kawaneta Brad­brook did in the inter­ests of stop­ping Maori smok­ing. The sta­tis­tics of course show that he has had no impact at all on the inci­dence of Maori smok­ing. How­ever worse detail is to come.

Today I present Trough­ing 102 – How to keep get­ting fund­ing despite a damn­ing audit report.

From the OIA doc­u­ments I have received I can con­firm that Te Reo Marama obtained the fol­low­ing amounts in funding;

2004/2005 $219,778
2005/2006 $194,052
2006/2007 $276,052
2007/2008 $262,052
2008/2009 $61,945
2009/2010 $220,718.55

Total: $1,234,597

But wait there’s more…

I have also obtained OIA doc­u­ments show­ing con­sid­er­able fund­ing from Hawkes Bay DHB (and what appears to be dou­ble dip­ping) and also have been informed about some highly sus­pect fund­ing from NZAid as well. I am await­ing the OIA requests from NZAid, but I fail to see why an organ­i­sa­tion that is sup­posed to be help­ing stop smok­ing amongst Maori got ANY fund­ing from NZAid whatsoever.

For each of those years of fund­ing shown above there are required reports that the Min­istry needs to mea­sure con­tracts issued against deliv­er­ables. I have also obtained those reports for the past three years to show you just how ridicu­lously easy it is to trough money from the Min­istry of Health at least.

TRM Mon­i­tor­ing Report 1 July 2006 – 31 Octo­ber 2006 – 29 pages of which 12 pages are copies of Let­ters to the edi­tor writ­ten by Shane Kawaneta Brad­brook, newslet­ters from Te Reo Marama or news arti­cles men­tion­ing him or Te Reo Marama.
TRM Mon­i­tor­ing Report 1 Novem­ber 2006 – 30 June 2007 – 23 pages of which 8 pages are copies of Let­ters to the edi­tor writ­ten by Shane Kawaneta Brad­brook, newslet­ters from Te Reo Marama or news arti­cles men­tion­ing him or Te Reo Marama.
TRM Mon­i­tor­ing Report 1 July 2007 – 31 Decem­ber 2007 -  23 pages of which 9 pages are copies of let­ters to the edi­tor writ­ten by Shane Kawaneta Brad­brook or news arti­cles men­tion­ing him or Te Reo Marama.
TRM Mon­i­tor­ing Report 1 Jan­u­ary 2008 – 30 June 2008 – 31 pages of which 17 pages are copies of Let­ters to the edi­tor writ­ten by Shane Kawaneta Brad­brook or news arti­cles men­tion­ing him or Te Reo Marama.
TRM mon­i­tor­ing Report 1 July 2008 – 30 Sep­tem­ber 2008 – 12 pages of which 1 pages is a copy of a media release from Te Reo Marama.
TRM scop­ing doc­u­ment 1 Octo­ber 2008– 30 June 2009 – 47 pages of tosh about what TRM is going to do, and what they have done.

Those reports essen­tially cost us, the tax­payer, $7482 a page! and yet the sta­tis­tics on Maori smok­ing sug­gest we would have been bet­ter just giv­ing the mil­lions out as roll your own papers.

But here is the inter­est­ing point. In 2007 the Min­istry of Health after fund­ing Te Reo Marama since 1999 decided to con­duct its first audit of TRM.  The audit report is damn­ing. Despite this audit report TRM con­tin­ued to receive Min­istry of Health fund­ing for what will be another three years.

The Audit Report, con­ducted in Novem­ber 2007 by May­hem Solu­tions Lim­ited at the behest of the Min­istry of Health details in its full 88 pages a list of defi­cien­cies so great that were Te Reo Marama a listed com­pany or indeed a nor­mal com­pany reg­is­tered at the Com­pa­nies Office would see either its shares sus­pended from trad­ing or it being struck off. The 88 pages of the report shows in detail just how out of con­trol Shane Kawaneta Bradbrook’s cult of per­son­al­ity was at Te Reo Marama.

Key find­ings of the audit report were;

• Lack of com­pli­ance by the Board with statu­tory obligations
• Sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of con­tracted for out­puts not achieved nor reported on. High risk
• No per­for­mance or mon­i­tor­ing mea­sures in place for the Direc­tor (Shane Kawaneta Brad­brook). High risk
• No suc­ces­sion plan­ning for key staff. High Risk
• No Board min­utes of approvals of annual bud­gets. High Risk
• No Finan­cial report­ing against bud­get, even annu­ally. High Risk
• No reports to the Board against key targets.
• No finan­cial man­age­ment processes where the Direc­tor can mea­sure monthly expen­di­ture against bud­get. High Risk
• Sig­nif­i­cant ambi­gu­ity in sign off pro­ce­dures for expenses. High Risk
• No estab­lish finan­cial del­e­ga­tions estab­lished for expen­di­tures between $500-$1000. High Risk
• No reserves, that is all fund­ing received had been spent in con­tra­ven­tion of the State Finance Act re: Pub­lic Monies and Surpluses
• No annual audited accounts com­pleted since 2006
• No pol­icy or record­ing of data as per Min­Health requests. High Risk……

The list goes on and on, I have merely high­lighted the com­plete lack of man­age­r­ial, board and finan­cial con­trols at Te Reo Marama. Essen­tially all that says is that Te Reo Marama existed as the per­sonal fief­dom of Shane Kawaneta Brad­brook and no-one at the board or the Min­istry of Health saw fit to do any­thing about it.

I haven’t even started to out­line the fail­ings against deliv­er­ables as per the con­tracts with the Min­istry which seem­ingly just kept get­ting signed off and approved. If this was a pri­vate com­pany the Direc­tors would be liable for pros­e­cu­tion for fail­ing in their fidu­ciary duties as direc­tors to pro­tect share­holder funds.

Most of the the three pages of rec­om­men­da­tions and notes about the fail­ings of ser­vice deliv­ery are rated as Medium or High Risk. The def­i­n­i­tion in the report of Medium Risk is “The impact or like­li­hood of the even occur­ring may result in, some instances of con­trac­tual non-compliance, finan­cial loss impact of 5–10% of fund­ing”. High Risk is described as “Sig­nif­i­cant instances of con­trac­tual non-compliance and/or inabil­ity to deliver against the con­tract, Inter­ven­tion required by senior man­age­ment and the Board to resolve ser­vice deliv­ery and qual­ity issues, seri­ous risk to client/patient safety, and finan­cial loss impact of more than 10% of funding”.

Essen­tially Te Reo Marama is a bomb wait­ing to go off and now because of this blog it has gone off. Worse is yet to come on this story. The 88 page audit report came about from just two days spent at Te Reo Marama. None of the Board were inter­viewed and no finan­cial audits were performed.

If the audi­tors had spent more time there, and/or con­ducted a full finan­cial and foren­sic audit as well as inter­ro­gated the Board mem­bers who knows what else may have been found. This report is damn­ing enough but since that report Te Reo marama has recieved more than $500,000 in addi­tional fund­ing from the taxpayer.

Just what sort of con­trol mea­sures were or are in place at the Min­istry of Health that an organ­i­sa­tion such as Te Reo Marama can con­tinue to trough despite egre­gious and out­ra­geous fail­ures in delivery.

Tomor­row: Trough­ing 103: How to be on a Board and dou­ble dip and trough as well.

Pop­u­lar­ity: 1% [?]

Related Posts:

• Time for a re-make
• Some of Winston’s troughing
• Gotcha! T.R.M. Fund­ing Cut – Still doesn’t get it.
• Gotcha!- T.R.M. fund­ing cut
• Exclu­sive: Te Reo Marama and Maori smok­ing – Trough­ing 101

Tagged as: fraud • Te Reo Marama • troughing