Several public sector agencies also provide good practice guidance and materials to help organisations safeguard public monies. We have collated guidance that could be beneficial with your counter fraud approach.
Ministry of Justice | Te Tāhū o te Ture
Fraud and Corruption Policy
The Ministry of Justice has prepared this framework to assist public and private sector organisations
to develop and improve their fraud and corruption policy and procedures.
Office of the Auditor-General | Tumuaki o te Mana Arotake
The Integrity Framework
The integrity framework (the framework) aims to reduce the gap between the culture an organisation wants to have and its actual practice.
The framework set out here is an integrated approach to examining the values, systems, and norms in a workplace. It's about identifying the key activities and ways of working that help to build and sustain integrity across the whole organisation. All the components are required and need to reinforce each other. They should be explicitly designed and monitored as a coherent system of improvement.
Conflicts Of Interest Guidance
The Office of the Auditor-General has created guidance on conflicts of interest and other helpful resources that you can use to strengthen good practice within your organisation.
Managing conflicts of interest helps to maintain the public’s trust and confidence in the integrity of the public sector. People often have personal knowledge of, or previous dealings with, people or organisations that they have to make decisions about. That’s not necessarily wrong. These connections might be remote or insignificant, but if the conflict isn’t managed well, an organisation could be exposed to legal or reputational risk.
Fraud Reported To OAG Auditors
The Office of the Auditor-General share information on the incidents of fraud that auditors have reported to them. This data can help you consider where your organisation is the most exposed to fraud risks.
The data outlines the different ways the reported fraud was detected, the different types of fraud committed and the reasons the fraud occurred.
Public Service Commission | Te Kawa Mataaho
Protected Disclosures (Protection of Whistleblowers) Act 2022
The Protected Disclosures (Protection of Whistleblowers) Act 2022 was recently enacted. It will come into force from 1 July 2022, replacing the Protected Disclosures Act 2000. It continues the 2000 Act’s purpose – to facilitate the disclosure and investigation of serious wrongdoing in the workplace and provide protection for employees/workers who report concerns. However it makes changes to address issues and improvements that have been identified.
All government organisations must have internal procedures for whistleblowing as receivers of protected disclosures. These procedures will need to be updated for the new Act. A major change in the new Act is that disclosers will now be able to go direct to an appropriate authority (trusted external parties who can be approached if the discloser is not confident making a disclosure in their own organisation), and this may result in more protected disclosures being received by some agencies.
Private sector organisations also have responsibilities under the new Act, and we are asking agencies to think about who in their sector needs to know about the new Protected Disclosures environment and how that might be communicated to them.