MORE than 100 recommendations made by the Comptroller and Auditor General over the past ten years had not been implemented by the government by the end of last year.
Lynn Pamment recently told the Chamber of Commerce that it was “frustrating” that government procurement processes had remained unchanged since 2014.
She explained that, although the government had made improvements, some areas had been a concern for almost a decade.
The Comptroller and Auditor General scrutinises government expenditure, with the work including the audit of financial statements and wider consideration of public funds including internal control, value for money and corporate governance.
Ms Pamment has previously produced reports on hospital plans, the government’s use of consultants, the pay of arms-length-body chief executives and the Island’s energy resilience.
She said: “At the end of 2023, there were still over 100 recommendations that have been made by myself and my predecessors that the States of Jersey still hadn’t implemented.
“Every single one of those recommendations not being implemented is, in my view, a missed opportunity for improvement in public services delivery in Jersey.
“At the moment, it takes on average two years to implement one of my recommendations, and I do encourage government to speed up that process.”
One recommendation, about procurement, that was still outstanding at the end of 2023 had originally been made in 2014.
Ms Pamment added that she was working on a review of financial management and internal control, but that this would not focus on procurement as the Public Accounts Committee was currently running a review of that subject.
She said that she found it “frustrating” to see recommendations going as far back as 2014 return to the same topics.
“I also noticed that sometimes it takes me returning to the areas a few times before we see that improvement made,” she explained.
Other areas of improvement included service delivery, which “always” accounted for about half of recommendations, Ms Pamment said.
The overall number of recommendations that were still open had gone down over time, she added.
Ms Pamment also said that her annual exercise of auditing the government expenditure generally showed “a significant improvement” in transparency of annual reports.
But the way that remuneration and staffing matters were detailed in annual reports still needed improvement, she said.
In some areas, she said, the government would embark on change but then “lose energy along the way”, resulting in around two-thirds of action plans “slipping a little bit”.
Ms Pamment said: “Quite a few of my reports talk about projects that are being embarked on with an expectation when the government starts the project that it will deliver a certain amount of benefits.
“But along the way, those benefits don’t get tracked, and do they really end up seeing those changes through to improved outcomes?”
Earlier this year, Ms Pamment found that the government had spent nearly £900 million on contracts that did not follow a proper process.
