Troy Grant and Nationals mismanaging Trade and Investment finances

MEDIA RELEASE - 17 December 2014

The Greens NSW Trade and Investment spokesperson Jeremy Buckingham today called on Troy Grant and his Nationals colleagues to explain a scathing Auditor General’s Financial Audit of the Department of Trade and Investment, Regional Infrastructure and Services which identified 129 reported misstatements in the cluster, criticised the “poor quality of financial reporting” and called on the responsible Ministers to “implement measures to improve the accuracy of their budgets”.

The Audit found 24 significant matters related to “financial reporting, valuation, prior period errors, accounting treatment of expenditure on land for public access, lack of controls over revenue and timeliness and quality of work papers”.

It also found “deficiencies in bank reconciliations, and poor documentation and record keeping of general ledger transactions.”

Local Land Services, Crown Lands and the Game Council came in for particular criticism with the Auditor General saying in the report that “A focus is needed on skill sets, ownership of issues and timeliness of actions to make improvement in these agencies.”

“Troy Grant and his Nationals team have got a lot of explaining to do after this scathing Auditor-General’s report has identified systemic failures in financial management within his portfolio and those of fellow National Ministers Kevin Humphries and Katrina Hodgkinson,” said Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham.

“The Nationals have confused cutting essential services in agriculture, biosecurity and water with good financial management and this report exposes their incompetence when it comes to managing the State.

“If they spent less time changing the names of departments and more time actually paying attention to the portfolios they are responsible for, then Trade and Investment’s finances would not be in such a mess.

“I am particularly concerned about Local Land Services which has failed to meet reporting deadlines, has made numerous misstatements in its accounts and failed to complete a full asset revaluation for Crown Lands as required,” he said.

Contact: Jack Gough – 9230 2202 or 0427 713 101

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s