Audit probe slams unfair approval system for poverty subsidies

The Commission of Audit (CA) revealed in an audit report that the Social Welfare Bureau (IAS) has failed to ensure a fair and impartial approval system for financial aid, nor has it been able to ensure that all of its assistance payments were distributed to the beneficiaries within an appropriate timeframe.
The report, released yesterday, indicated that the IAS granted over MOP309.68 million in total in 2013 to individuals and households that were suffering from inadequate financial conditions, and that the 7,990 applications were handled by five centers. However, flaws were found in its approval procedures, its distribution and its supervision of the subsidy scheme.
According to the report, the IAS’s five affiliated community centers responsible for approving the financial aid had adopted their own differing standards when measuring applicants’ income and savings. Due to a lack of specific regulations, social welfare items exempted in the income calculation, such as the government’s annual cash handout, could result in a difference as high as MOP248,000.
Moreover, inconsistencies and omissions were found in the verification procedures when verifying applicants’ eligibility, despite the fact that the bureau had formed established guidelines to regulate the process.
The CA pointed out “the requirements stipulated in the working guideline are in fact not entirely the same as the verbal requests that IAS made to the staff. Meanwhile, those verbal requests were conveyed to frontline staff through multiple ranks, which eventually caused the staff members conducting the verification to do so by their own understanding and standard.”
The audit investigation further discovered a wide gap in different centers’ verification workload. The center that assumed a greater workload tended to make more mistakes and demonstrated a low compliance to regulations.
In addition, the report condemned the fact that the IAS lacks a regulatory mechanism with which to monitor aid payments that were distributed to recipients in cash or being collected and delivered by social workers. As those social work centers were not requested to hand in recipients’ signed receipts to the IAS’ treasury department, the bureau was unable to oversee the cash distribution and the fund balance, which also prevented it from ensuring that each beneficiary could receive their subsidies in a timely manner. “In fact, that cash is held by the IAS but isn’t counted in the cash balance of the bureau’s accounting records,” noted the report.
In response to the audit probe on whether the aid system is capable of effectively distributing and monitoring subsidies in compliance with the law, the IAS stated yesterday that it had launched a full review into the problems unearthed, and unified its working guidelines in July. BY