On 28 July, TINZ sent an open letter to the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. "We encourage you both to work with Chief Executives across government to ensure that their agencies meet the compliance standards in the Procurement Rules that have been mandated by Cabinet."

The New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) was found to have "manifestly inadequate" administration and institutional accountability systems for gathering, recording, preserving, investigating and providing information. This directly impacted on the quality of information provided by NZDF to successive Ministers of Defence, and through them to Parliament.

It is disappointing that the leadership of the New Zealand Open Government Partnership (OGP) programme has not published any information on the programme for the last six months.

Join Transparency International New Zealand, the Victoria University Brian Picot Chair of Ethical Leadership and 2020 Election Candidates from across Wellington on Tuesday 6 October (rescheduled from 25 August), as they share their insights and perspectives on business and political integrity during our recovery from the COVID-19 crisis.

The July 2020 Groupthink webinar focussed on democracy under threat, as reflected in social media. Sanjana Hattotuwa spoke about weaponising social media while Josie Pagani focussed on New Zealand’s population dynamics. Kim Connolly-Stone was MC for this most insightful session.

Without transparency during the COVID-19 pandemic, human rights are compromised and inequality may lead to greater corruption.  This is profoundly affecting peace and security across the globe.

June Brain Food Webinar recap The aspirational outcome for this webinar is that we can build a team to bring about changes to the law, policies and practice around beneficial ownership, to better protect New Zealand from potentially massive impacts of international grand corruption.

As we rebuild we will need to consider far more seriously how we manage our net-debt ratios, in particular over the next 12-24 months where we will see increased volatility. We need to urgently find different ways of working focussed on maintaining the liquidity flow in our businesses.

Extended Open Government Partnership (OGP) timeline gives government agencies an extra year to fully tackle the social, economic, political, or environmental problems they initially identified in the OGP action plan and also take COVID-19 into account.

For the effectiveness of the Protective Disclosures Bill as it currently stands before Parliament, the proof will be in the pudding. It will be important to have more rigorous monitoring of whistleblowing events and outcomes to determine if the new legislation actually encourages more people to speak up.

The level of compliance of government agencies with the mandatory procurement rules needs significant improvement. All government agencies need to improve the quality of the information that they monitor and publish about contract award notices.

This year TINZ offers voters a set of open-ended questions to ask candidates in the run-up to New Zealand’s central government election on 19 September. They are about fighting corruption, integrity, accountability and transparency. These questions complement more detailed questions we have put to the main political parties.