On 30 August 2024 TINZ in collaboration with the NZ Chapters of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) and Risk Management Society (RIMS), and supported by the Office of the Auditor General, hosted an anti-corruption forum. Its focus was around the public sector anti-corruption ecosystem in New Zealand. Debbie Gee, Deputy Chair of TINZ chaired the forum (Anne Tolley, TINZ Chair was overseas).
The forum was attended in person or online by around 100 people from the public sector, business, NGO, academia and the media. The Wellington forum followed a business focussed forum in Auckland on the previous day.
The forum took advantage of the visit to New Zealand of François Valérian, Chair of the global body of Transparency International. François was visiting New Zealand as a part of a whirlwind tour of the Pacific visiting with Transparency International chapters.
François talked about the global economy of corruption and the trillions of dollars of corrupt money across the world. As traditional destinations for corrupt money such as the US and UK are getting better at curtailing the flow, bad actors look elsewhere, particularly to countries with excellent reputations and weaker enforcement like Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
This is why, he says, it is so important for countries like New Zealand to take action on global commitments such as beneficial ownership registers and more transparent public procurement.
He commended his Pacific colleagues for their courage in advocating for power to be exercised for the benefit of the people and their efforts to prevent the all too frequent use of power to extract money for personal gain.
The second major purpose of the event was to launch the research report commissioned by TINZ and undertaken by Dr Simon Chapple. This considered the effectiveness of anti-corruption institutions in New Zealand in deterring, detecting and exposing corruption. That report is summarised in a separate article and available as a full research report and in summary: How Well Do we Counter Corruption?
Andrew McConnell, the Deputy-Auditor General then led a panel discussion with panel members from the Serious Fraud Office, NZ Police and the Ministry of Justice - these are the core agencies with anti-corruption responsibilities in the New Zealand anti-corruption ecosystem. The panel also included Philippa Yasbek, researcher for the recently released report Shining a Light: Improving transparency in NZ's political and governance systems.
There was a robust question and answer session on various topics including a national anti-corruption strategy, the recent decision to delay work on a beneficial ownership register for New Zealand, access to information, the Open Government Partnership, government procurement and on fraud.
Attendees also noted with concern the recent decision of Cabinet to remove a Register of Beneficial Ownership from the package of measures aimed to modernise the Companies Act. See “Whaat? Beneficial Ownership Register on ice?”
The recording of the forum is a worthwhile watch:
