Gov’t auditor criticizes IAM’s unreasonable progress on tree management system

A follow-up report from the Commission of Audit (CA) to monitor the Municipal Affairs Bureau’s (IAM) management of Macau’s trees and green areas, found that the measures enforced in the near-decade since the first CA report in November 2010, are still insufficient and inadequate to deal with the problem.
The new report, dated February 2020 and made public yesterday, still notes the lack of implementation of the programs by the IAM, especially regarding tree management, one of the severe flaws detected in the first CA report.
According to the new report, “the audit results show that the improvement measures adopted to follow up on the [problems initially encountered] are still insufficient,” adding that most of the problems persist and “have not been improved, even though several years have passed.”
The new report also found that the tree management system – which consists of an individual record of all the existing trees as well their characteristics and would be used to define policies and strategies for conservation of green areas – has only registered 24,000 entries out of an estimated number of nearly 650,000 existing trees in Macau. According to the auditor, this is an amount of work considered to be unreasonable.
On this topic, the CA noted that from the total number of possible trees, nearly 80,000 trees are planted on slopes next to the roads where there is a large circulation of people and, for that reason, easily accessible by IAM staff.
This led the CA to conclude that this “demonstrates, once again, that the IAM did not achieve the objective initially set for having data on all trees existing in Macau and having a mechanism that contributes to the definition of daily procedures and future strategies for the conservation of the grove.”
Severe flaws were also found in the assessment of trees, with the audit report released in 2010 stating, “the front line staff responsible for the conservation of the IAM grove do not have professional training.” This meant that the tree assessment work “did not comply with the established rules, resulting in inspections carried out did not prevent trees from falling due to disease.”
The CA says that current situation persists at present, with the Committee finding that “inspections were neither defined nor executed properly.” Besides creating risk for public security, this situation does not prevent trees falling due to diseases.
In conclusion, the CA criticized the IAM for always prioritizing the easy jobs and systematically neglecting the difficult ones. It is “an attitude that did not allow [the Bureau] to fulfill its objectives,” the report concluded.
In another report published yesterday, the CA expressed concerns over the lack of supervision on the enforcement of rules regarding the many financial support measures and plans under the Macao Foundation (FM).
The Commission analyzed the procedures of the FM relating to the granting and supervision of some 2.2 billion patacas in funding in 2018. The CA concluded that flaws and procedure errors already reported on previous occasions persist unresolved.
The report analyzed the financial support measures granted by the FM between 2012 and 2018 and concluded that although some improvements have been implemented and better systems were put in place after the report from the CA back in 2012, many flaws still carry potential risks for the public purse.
One of the aspects that saw improvement was the timely receipt of the mandatory reports by the fund beneficiaries.
However, other flaws continue to be clear to the CA, namely regarding the audits of the beneficiaries’ accounts, which, according to data cited in the report, accounted only for 1.6% of the financial reports presented to the FM.
The Commission also found that the FM department responsible for monitoring the most expensive fund projects had “carried out few inspections to the income and expenses and, those that were carried out, were not done in a very comprehensive manner, being very far from being considered a rigorous audit.”
The FM already replied to the report from the CA, acknowledging the flaws, promising to “verify, analyze, and correct in due time the existing problems.”