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SINGAPORE: Ministers provided updates on the lapses noted by the Auditor General’s Office (AGO) in its 2020 report following questions in Parliament on Monday (October 5) about some of the findings.
Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) Minister Indranee Rajah said that all agencies take audit observations seriously and are committed to making improvements.
“Actions have been taken at the government-wide level to address the identified gaps,” he said.
In response to question from Alex Yam, Member of Parliament for Marsiling-Yew Tee GRC, about flaws in IT access controls in the report, he said that manual processes for access control to more than 2,000 IT systems government should be automated.
As many systems have been developed and then upgraded or replaced since the 1980s, access controls are not linked between systems and must be manually adjusted, creating opportunities for human error.
“When an officer moves to another portfolio, it requires a chain of manual adjustments to different systems, to remove outdated access rights and create new access rights for the officer. Reliance on manual adjustments is prone to human error.” , He said.
The Smart Nation and Digital Government Group is developing systems that will automate the processes involved and minimize errors, he said.
“It will take some time to fully implement the solutions across the government because we need to implement the automated process across the 2,000+ IT systems.”
READ: Lapses in Procurement, Grant Disbursements, and IT Systems in Public Bodies: Auditor General’s Report
Three other MPs raised questions about the AGO report, including Sengkang GRC Member of Parliament Louis Chua, who wanted to know whether Jurong Town Corporation (JTC) had completed investigations into the AGO’s finding that the facilities of the JTC could have been subleased to some 26,000 business entities without JTC approval.
Prime Minister’s Office Minister Tan See Leng said that JTC has confirmed around 400 cases of unauthorized subletting to date, but most of the 26,000 cases are not in fact tenants or tenants of JTC. JTC said it will complete its investigations by the first half of 2021.
So far, JTC has found that 1,900 are decommissioned entities, 700 are in disposed of properties where JTC’s sublease policies do not apply, and another 12,400 are related entities of JTC tenants and tenants to whom no rental fees apply sublease.
He added that the JTC has prioritized investigations for the remaining 40 percent of the entities, which number around 11,000.
“We will take all active measures, all active measures to recover these fees (which are owed) and in cases where a clearly defined illicit sublease has been proven, we will not hesitate to take legal action,” he said.
NO MORE TURNS FOR PCP: JOSEPHINE TEO
The opposition leader and congressman of the GRC, Pritam Singh, asked questions about the AGO’s findings regarding the disbursements of the Business Development Grant (EDG) and the Professional Conversion Program (PCP).
The AGO had conducted a thematic audit of Workforce Singapore (WSG) and Enterprise Singapore Board’s key grant programs and found that improvements could be made in some areas.
Mr. Singh’s question focused on a finding that three of WSG’s program partners failed to conduct adequate verification of career conversion in 11 disbursement cases involving 15 PCP participants.
Manpower Minister Josephine Teo said that the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) determined that the training was carried out correctly, but AGO noted that program partners had not documented how past and current work scopes of the participants were different, which is the requirement for training to receive PCP support.
WSG has reviewed each of these cases and verified that the 15 participants changed their work scopes and successfully converted to new work roles through their respective PCPs, he said.
“It is not that the scope of work has not changed substantially, it is simply the fact that the program partners did not document it properly and did not have a very consistent way of assessing the degree of career conversion,” he added.
She said that about nine out of 10 PCP participants stayed on the job 24 months after being placed, and about seven out of 10 earned higher wages after starting their new jobs.
“The audit findings of the Office of the Auditor General do not question the impact of these programs on participants, but have highlighted problems with the practices of WSG’s program partners,” he said.
WSG will develop a new PCP guide for all its program partners by the end of the year with guidelines on how career conversion should be consistently assessed, as well as critical information that program partners should report to ensure better and consistent monitoring. from the PCP results, she said.
Beyond the cases studied by AGO, WSG initiated a verification of more than 15,000 PCP placements to detect similar failures. Although the review will only be fully completed later this year, WSG has not discovered any more lapses so far, Ms Teo said.
ESG GRANT
Singh also raised a question about AGO’s finding that a project awarded an ESG grant had likely circumvented one criterion, having a minimum 30 percent local stake, by transferring shares between its local and foreign shareholders.
The Minister of State for Commerce and Industry and Culture, Community and Youth, Low Yen Ling, said that the grant conditions require all grant recipients to inform ESG of any changes in application information during the course of the draft.
For the case raised in the AGO report, no disbursement has been made to the company and it has also been placed on ESG’s watch list for stricter scrutiny of future grant applications, he said.
Mr. Liang Eng Hwa, MP from Bukit Panjang SMC, wanted to know how the civil service ensures that officials are adequately trained and supervised to comply with government procurement processes.
Ms Indranee, who is also Second Minister of Finance and Second Minister of National Development, said that recurring lapses tend to be for more complex types of acquisitions, such as IT and construction, and in less straightforward cases, such as assessing the reasonableness of prices for single tenders and management of urgent contract variations.
The Ministry of Finance (MOF) is intensifying the training of officials in key areas such as evaluation and approval of tenders and will provide additional guidance to the approving authorities, which will be available early next year.
It is also strengthening IT and construction contract and procurement management capabilities. The Finance Ministry and the School of Civil Service jointly established the Academy of Finance and Procurement this year to better equip public officials with skills in finance, procurement and contract management, he added.
